The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
Copyright ©2010–2015 All rights reserved. Jonathan Bennett
[Brackets] enclose editorial explanations. Small ·dots· enclose material that has been added, but can be read as
though it were part of the original text. Occasional •bullets, and also indenting of passages that are not quotations,
are meant as aids to grasping the structure of a sentence or a thought. Every four-point ellipsis . . . . indicates the
omission of a brief passage that seems to present more difficulty than it is worth. Longer omissions are reported
between brackets in normal-sized type.—In Adam Smith’s day a ‘sentiment’ could be anything on a spectrum
with feelings at one end and opinions at the other. This work of his is strongly tilted in the ‘feeling’ direction [see
especially the chapter starting on page 168), but throughout the present version the word ‘sentiment’ will be left
untouched. First launched: July 2008
Contents
Part I: The Propriety of Action
1
Section 1: The Sense of Propriety . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 1: Sympathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 2: The pleasure of mutual sympathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 3: How we judge the propriety of other men’s affections by their concord
our own . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 4: The same subject continued . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 5: The likeable virtues and the respectworthy virtues . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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or dissonance with
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Section 2: The degrees of the different passions that are consistent with propriety . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
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Adam Smith
passions that originate in the body . .
passions that originate in a particular
unsocial passions . . . . . . . . . . . . .
social passions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
selfish passions . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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turn or habit of the imagination . . . . . . . . . . .
Section 3: How prosperity and adversity affect our judgments about the rightness of actions; and
why it is easier to win our approval in prosperity than in adversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25
Chapter 1: The intensity-difference between joy and sympathy with joy is less than the intensitydifference between sorrow and sympathy with sorrow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Chapter 2: The origin of ambition, and differences of rank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Chapter 3: The corruption of our moral sentiments that comes from this disposition to admire the rich
and the great, and to despise or neglect the downtrodden and poor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
Part II: Merit and demerit: the objects of reward and punishment
Section 1: The sense of merit and demerit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
36
36
Chapter 1: Whatever appears to be the proper object of gratitude (resentment) appears to deserve
reward (punishment) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
Chapter 2: The proper objects of gratitude and resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Chapter 3: Where there’s no approval of the benefactor’s conduct, there’s not much sympathy with the
beneficiary’s gratitude; and where there’s no disapproval of the motives of the person who does
someone harm, there’s absolutely no sympathy with the victim’s resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Chapter 4: Recapitulation of the preceding chapters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Chapter 5: Analysing the sense of merit and demerit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Section 2: Justice and beneficence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
42
Chapter I: Comparing those two virtues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
Chapter 2: The sense of justice, of remorse, and of the consciousness of merit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Chapter 3: The utility of this constitution of nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
Section 3: The influence of luck on mankind’s sentiments regarding the merit or demerit of actions
52
Chapter 1: The causes of this influence of luck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
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Chapter 2: The extent of this influence of luck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Chapter 3: The purpose of this irregularity of sentiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Part III: Moral judgments on ourselves; the sense of duty
55
58
62
Chapter 1: The principle of self-approval and self-disapproval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Chapter 2: The love of praise and of praiseworthiness; the dread of blame and of blameworthiness . . . . 64
Chapter 3: The influences and authority of conscience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Chapter 4: The nature of self-deceit, and the origin and use of general rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Chapter 5: The influence and authority of the general rules of morality, and why they are rightly
regarded as the laws of the Deity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
Chapter 6: When should the sense of duty be the sole driver of our conduct? and when should it
co-operate with other motives? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Part IV: The effect of utility on the sentiment of approval
96
Chapter 1: The beauty that the appearance of utility gives to all the productions of art, and the
widespread influence of this type of beauty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
Chapter 2: How the characters and actions of men are made beautiful by their appearance of utility. Is
our perception of this beauty one of the basic sources of approval? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100
Part V: The moral influence of custom and fashion
105
Chapter 1: The influence of custom and fashion on our notions of beauty and ugliness . . . . . . . . . . 105
Chapter 2: The influence of custom and fashion on moral sentiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Part VI: The character of virtue
112
Section 1: Prudence, i.e. the character of the individual in its bearing on his own happiness . . . . . . 112
Section 2: The character of the individual in its bearing on the happiness of other people . . . . . . . 115
Chapter 1: The order in which individuals are recommended by nature to our care and attention . . . . 116
Chapter 2: The order in which societies are recommended by nature to our beneficence . . . . . . . . . . 120
Chapter 3: Universal benevolence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Section 3: Self-control . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
Part VII: Systems of moral philosophy
139
Section 1: The questions that ought to be examined in a theory of moral sentiments . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Section 2: The different accounts that have been given of the nature of virtue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
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Systems that make virtue consist in propriety . . .
A system that makes virtue consist in prudence .
Systems that make virtue consist in benevolence .
Licentious systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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. 140
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. 155
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Section 3: The different systems that have been formed concerning the source of approval . . . . . . 163
Chapter 1: Systems that trace the source of approval back to self-love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
Chapter 2: Systems that make reason the source of approval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166
Chapter 3: Systems that make sentiment the source of approval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168
Section 4: What different authors have said about the practical rules of morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
1: The Propriety of Action
Part I: The Propriety of Action
Section 1: The Sense of Propriety
Chapter 1: Sympathy
then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.
Just as being in pain or distress of any kind arouses the
most excessive sorrow, so conceiving or imagining being in
pain or distress arouses some degree of the same emotion,
the degree being large or small depending on how lively or
dull the conception is. [Notice Smith’s talk of ‘bringing home to us’
No matter how selfish you think man is, it’s obvious that
there are some principles [here = ‘drives’, ‘sources of energy’; see
note on page 164] in his nature that give him an interest in the
welfare of others, and make their happiness necessary to
him, even if he gets nothing from it but the pleasure of seeing
it. That’s what is involved in pity or compassion, the emotion
we feel for the misery of others, when we see it or are made
to think about it in a vivid way. The sorrow of others often
makes us sad—that’s an obvious matter of fact that doesn’t
need to be argued for by giving examples. This sentiment,
like all the other basic passions of human nature, is not
confined to virtuous and humane people, though they may
feel it more intensely than others do. The greatest ruffian,
the most hardened criminal, has something of it.
someone’s emotional state; he often uses that turn of phrase to express
the idea of imaginatively putting oneself in someone else’s position.]
So my thesis is that our fellow-feeling for the misery of
others comes from our imaginatively changing places with
the sufferer, thereby coming to •conceive what he feels or
even to •feel what he feels. If this doesn’t seem to you
obvious enough, just as it stands, there is plenty of empirical
evidence for it. When we see someone poised to smash a
stick down on the leg or arm of another person, we naturally
shrink and pull back our own leg or arm; and when the stick
connects, we feel it in some measure, and are hurt by it
along with the sufferer. When a crowd are gazing at a dancer
on a slack rope, they naturally writhe and twist and balance
their own bodies, as they see him do, and as they feel they
would have to do if they were up on the rope where he is. . . .
Men notice that when they look at sore eyes they often feel
soreness in their own eyes. . . .
It’s not only in situations of pain or sorrow that this
fellow-feeling of ours is evoked. When someone has any
passion about any object, the thought of his situation creates an analogous emotion in the breast of every attentive
spectator. [In Smith’s day it was normal to use ‘the breast’ to mean
We have ·of course· no immediate experience of what
other men feel; so the only way we can get an idea of what
someone else is feeling is by thinking about what we would
feel if we were in his situation. . . . Our imagination comes
into this, but only by representing to us the feelings we would
have if etc. We see or think about a man being tortured on the
rack; we think of ourselves enduring all the same torments,
entering into his body (so to speak) and becoming in a way
the same person as he is. In this manner we form some idea
of his sensations, and even feel something that somewhat
resembles them, though it is less intense. When his agonies
are brought home to us in this way, when we have adopted
them and made them our own, they start to affect us and we
something like ‘the emotional part or aspect of the person’. It will be
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Adam Smith
Our joy
over the deliverance of the heroes of tragedy or romance
is as sincere as our grief for their distress. . . . We enter
into their gratitude towards the faithful friends who stayed
with them in their difficulties; and we heartily go along with
their resentment against the perfidious traitors who injured,
abandoned, or deceived them. [The phrase ‘go along with’, though
1: The Propriety of Action
them, before we know what gave rise to them. The furious
behaviour of an angry man is more likely to exasperate us
against •him than against •his enemies. Because we don’t
know what provoked him, we can’t bring his case home to
ourselves, imaginatively putting ourselves in his position.
But we can put ourselves in the position of those with whom
he is angry; we can see what violence they may be exposed to
from such an enraged adversary. So we readily sympathize
with their fear or resentment, and are immediately inclined
to side with them against the man from whom they appear
to be in so much danger.
·There’s a very general point underlying the difference
between our reaction to someone else’s grief or joy and
our reaction to someone’s rage·. The mere appearances
of grief or joy inspire us with some level of a similar emotion,
because they suggest to us the general idea of some good
or bad fortune that has come to the person in whom we
observe them; and with grief and joy this is sufficient to
have some little influence on us. Grief and joy don’t have
effects that go beyond •the person who has the grief or joy;
expressions of those passions don’t suggest to us—in the way
that expressions of resentment do—the idea of some other
person for whom we are concerned and whose interests are
opposite to •his. So the general idea of good or bad fortune
creates some concern for the person who has met with it,
but the general idea of provocation arouses no sympathy
with the anger of the man who has been provoked. It seems
that nature teaches us •to be more averse to entering into
this passion and •to be inclined to take sides against it until
we are informed of its cause.
Even our sympathy with someone else’s grief or joy is
incomplete until we know the cause of his state. General
lamentations that express nothing but the anguish of the
sufferer don’t cause in us any •actual strongly-felt sympathy;
retained sometimes in this version, always with that meaning.]
it sounds late modern, is Smith’s; he uses it about 30 times in this work.]
In every passion of which the mind of man is capable, the
emotions of the bystander always correspond to what he
imagines must be the feelings of the sufferer, which he does
by bringing the case home to himself, ·i.e. imagining being
himself in the sufferer’s situation·.
‘Pity’ and ‘compassion’ are labels for our fellow-feeling
with the sorrow of others. ‘Sympathy’, though its meaning
may originally have been the same, can now fairly properly be
used to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.
[Since Smith’s time, ‘sympathy’ has moved back to what he says was its
original meaning: we don’t say ‘She had great sympathy for his joy’. In
the present version the word will be retained; his broadened meaning for
it needs to be remembered.]
We sometimes see sympathy arise merely from the view of
a certain emotion in another person: the passions sometimes
seem to be passed from one man to another instantaneously,
without the second man’s having any knowledge of what
aroused them in the first man. When grief or joy, for example,
are strongly expressed in someone’s look and gestures, they
immediately affect the spectator with some degree of a similar
painful or agreeable emotion. A smiling face is a cheerful
object to everyone who sees it, and a sorrowful face is a
melancholy one.
But this doesn’t hold for every passion. There are some
passions the expressions of which arouse no sort of sympathy; they serve rather to disgust and provoke us against
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
what they do is to make us want to inquire into the person’s
situation, and to make us •disposed to sympathize with him.
The first question we ask is ‘What has happened?’ Until this
is answered, our fellow-feeling is not very considerable. We
do feel unhappy, ·but that is from sources different from
sympathy; it is· because of the vague idea we have of his
misfortune, and still more from our torturing ourselves with
guesses about what the source of his misery may be.
So the main source of sympathy is not the view of the
other person’s passion but rather the situation that arouses
the passion. Sometimes we feel for someone else a passion that he ·doesn’t have and· apparently isn’t capable
of having; because that passion arises in •our breast just
from •imagining ourselves as being in his situation, though
it doesn’t arise in •his breast from •really being in that
situation. When we blush for someone’s impudence and
rudeness, though he seems to have no sense of how badly
he is behaving, that is because we can’t help feeling how
utterly embarrassed we would be if we had behaved in such
an absurd manner.
Of all the calamities to which mankind can be subject,
the loss of reason appears to be by far the most dreadful, in
the mind of anyone who has the least spark of humanity. We
behold that last stage of human wretchedness with deeper
pity than any other. But the poor wretch who is in that
condition may laugh and sing, having no sense of his own
misery. The anguish that the rest of us feel at the sight
of such a person can’t be a reflection of any sentiment
that he has. The spectator’s compassion must arise purely
from the thought of what he himself would feel if he were
reduced to that same unhappy condition while also (this may
well be impossible) regarding it with his present reason and
judgment.
1: The Propriety of Action
What are the pangs of a mother when she hears the
moanings of her infant who can’t express what it feels during
the agony of disease? In her idea of what it suffers, she
brings together
•her child’s real helplessness,
•her own consciousness of that helplessness, and
•her own terrors for the unknown consequences of the
child’s illness,
and out of all these she forms, for her own sorrow, the
most complete image of misery and distress. [The phrase
‘for her own sorrow’ is Smith’s, as is ‘for our own misery’ in the next
But the infant feels only the unpleasantness of
the present instant, which can never be great. With regard
to the future, the infant is perfectly secure. Its lack of
thoughtfulness and of foresight gives it an antidote against
•fear and •anxiety—those great tormentors of the human
breast, from which reason and philosophy will in vain try to
defend the child when it grows up to be a man.
We sympathize even with the dead. Ignoring what is of
real importance in their situation, namely the awe-inspiring
question of what future is in store for them ·in the after-life·,
we are mainly affected by factors that strike our senses but
can’t have any influence on their happiness. It is miserable,
we think, to be deprived of the light of the sun; to be shut out
from life and conversation; to be laid in the cold grave, a prey
to corruption and worms; to be no more thought of in this
world, but to be quite soon obliterated from the affections,
and almost from the memory, of their dearest friends and
relatives. Surely, we imagine, we can never feel too much for
those who have suffered such dreadful calamity! The tribute
of our fellow-feeling seems to be doubly due to them now,
when they are in danger of being forgotten by everyone; and
in paying vain honours to their memory we are trying, for our
own misery, artificially to keep alive our sad remembrance
paragraph.]
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Adam Smith
of their misfortune. The fact that our sympathy can’t bring
them any consolation seems to add to their calamity; and
our own sense of their misery is sharpened by the thought
that anything we can do ·for them· is unavailing, and that
the regret, the love, and the lamentations of their friends,
which alleviate every other kind of distress, can’t bring them
any comfort. But it is absolutely certain that the welfare of
the dead isn’t affected by any of this; the profound security
of their repose can’t be disturbed by the thought of any of
these things. The idea of the dreary and endless melancholy
that our imagination naturally ascribes to their condition is
purely a result of putting together
•the change that they have undergone,
•our own consciousness of that change,
•our putting ourselves in their situation—inserting
our living souls into their dead bodies (so to speak),
and conceiving what our emotions would be in that
situation.
It is just •this illusion of the imagination that makes the
thought of our own dissolution so terrible to us. It’s because
of •it that the thought of circumstances that undoubtedly
can’t give us pain when we are dead makes us miserable
while we are alive. That is the source of one of the most
important action-drivers in human nature, namely the dread
of death, which is the great poison to happiness but the
great restraint on the injustice of mankind; it afflicts and
humiliates the individual, while guarding and protecting
society.
1: The Propriety of Action
and nothing shocks us more than the seeming absence of
such fellow-feeling. Those who are fond of deriving all our
sentiments from certain refinements of self-love think they
can explain this pleasure and this pain consistently with
their own principles. Their explanation goes like this:
Man is conscious of his own weakness, and of his
need for the assistance of others; so he rejoices when
he sees that they do adopt his own passions, because
this assures him of that assistance; and he grieves
when he sees that they don’t, because that assures
him of their opposition.
But both the pleasure and the pain are always felt so
instantaneously, and often on such minor issues, that it
seems evident that neither of them can come from any such
self-interested consideration. A man is cast down when,
after having tried to be amusing, he looks around and sees
that no-one else laughs at his jokes; and when his jokes
do succeed, he gets great pleasure from the amusement
of the people he is with, and regards this match between
their sentiments and his own as the greatest applause. ·It’s
not plausible to suggest that what’s going on here is rapid
calculation about whether he will be helped in times of need·.
[Smith’s next paragraph is not unclear but is very compressed. What follows here is a more fully spelled-out
statement of its content. Our immediate topic is (let’s say) the
pleasure I get from seeing that my companions are enjoying
my jokes. Smith has been expounding this explanation of
the pleasure:
(1) I enjoy the jokes, and I want others to sympathize
with my frame of mind by enjoying them too; and I
suffer disappointment if this doesn’t happen.
This, Smith holds, is an instance of the natural universal human desire for others to show sympathy. In our present
paragraph he mentions a different possible explanation:
Chapter 2: Pleasure of mutual sympathy
Whatever the cause of sympathy may be, and however it
may be aroused, nothing pleases us more than to observe in
others a fellow-feeling with all the emotions of our own breast,
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Adam Smith
1: The Propriety of Action
So it’s important to notice ·that the grief and pain side
is more important to us than the joy side·. We’re more
concerned to communicate to our friends our disagreeable
passions than our agreeable ones; and it’s in connection
with the disagreeable passions that we get more satisfaction
from their sympathy and are more upset when they don’t
sympathize.
When an unfortunate person finds others to whom he
can communicate the cause of his sorrow, how does this
bring him relief? Their sympathy seems to unload some
of his burden of distress; it’s not wrong to say that they
share it with him. . . . Yet by recounting his misfortunes he
to some extent renews his grief. They awaken in his memory
the remembrance of the circumstances that brought about
his affliction. His tears accordingly flow faster than before,
and he is apt to abandon himself to all the weakness of
sorrow. But he takes pleasure in all this, and can be seen to
be relieved by it, because the sweetness of their sympathy
more than compensates for the bitterness of his sorrow—the
sorrow that he had thus enlivened and renewed in order
to arouse this sympathy. The cruelest insult that can be
offered to the unfortunate is to appear to make light of their
calamities. To seem not to be affected with the joy of our
companions is mere •impoliteness; but not to have a serious
expression when they tell us their afflictions is real and gross
•inhumanity.
Love is an agreeable passion, resentment a disagreeable
one; and accordingly we’re not half so anxious that our
friends should adopt our friendships as that they should
enter into our resentments. We can forgive them for seeming
not to be much affected when some favour comes our way,
but we lose all patience if they seem not to care about
injuries that have been done to us; and we aren’t half as
angry with them for not entering into our gratitude as for
(2) I enjoy the jokes; if others also enjoy them, then by
sympathetically taking in their pleasure I increase my
own; and if they don’t enjoy them, I suffer from the
absence of a hoped-for extra pleasure.
This has nothing to do with a desire to be sympathised with;
it is simply an instance of sympathy. This may be a part of
the story, Smith says, but isn’t all of it. Now let him take
over:] When we have read a book or poem so often that we
can no longer enjoy reading it by ourselves, we can still take
pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the
graces of novelty; we enter into the surprise and admiration
that it naturally arouses in him but can no longer arouse
in us; we consider the ideas that it presents in the light in
which they appear to him rather than in the light in which
they appear to ourselves, and we enjoy by sympathy his
enjoyment that thus enlivens our own. If he seemed not
to be entertained by the book, we would be annoyed and
could no longer take pleasure in reading it to him. It’s like
that with our attempts to amuse others. The company’s
merriment no doubt enlivens our own, and their silence no
doubt disappoints us. But though this may contribute both
to the pleasure we get from success and the pain we feel if we
fail, it is far from being the only cause of either the pleasure
or the pain; it can’t account for the pleasure we get when
our sentiments are matched by the sentiments of others, or
the pain that comes from a failure of such a match. [The main
thing Smith says about why that’s not the whole story is that it can’t be
I hope my friends will feel
sad when I am sad, but not because I want their feelings to
reflect back on me and increase my sadness! I do want their
sympathy; if they show that they sympathize, this alleviates
grief by insinuating into the heart almost the only agreeable
sensation that it is capable of receiving at that time. ·The
pattern here is that of (1) and not (2)·.
any of the grief or pain side of the story.]
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1: The Propriety of Action
Chapter 3: Judging others’ affections
not sympathizing with our resentment. They can easily
avoid being friends to our friends, but can hardly avoid
being enemies to those with whom we are at odds. We may
sometimes make a gesture towards an awkward quarrel
with them if they are at enmity with any of our friends, but
we don’t usually outright resent this; whereas we seriously
quarrel with them if they live in friendship with any of our
enemies. The agreeable passions of love and joy can satisfy
and support the heart without any supplementary pleasure,
but the bitter and painful emotions of grief and resentment
strongly require the healing consolation of sympathy.
[•Smith uses ‘affection’ about 200 times, usually in a meaning that
sprawls across feelings and mental attitudes of all kinds; on page 117
and a few other places it express the idea of someone’s being ‘affectionate’ in our sense. There is no satisfactory way to sort this out; you’ll
have to be guided by the context of each use. As for the cognate verb:
when Smith writes of our being ‘differently affected’ by something he
means that it causes us to have different ‘affections’ in the very broad
sense.
•In Smith’s day ‘propriety’ meant ‘correctness’, ‘rightness’; it
was a very general term to cover one side of the right/wrong line. It
won’t be replaced by anything else in this version; but remember that it
Just as the person who is primarily concerned in any
event is pleased with our sympathy and hurt by the lack
of it, so also we seem to be pleased when we can sympathize with him and upset when we can’t. We run not
only to congratulate the successful but also to condole with
the afflicted; and the •pleasure we get from contact with
someone with whom we can entirely sympathize in all the
passions of his heart seems to do more than compensate
for the •painfulness of the sorrow that our knowledge of his
situation gives us. When we find that we can’t sympathize
with a friend’s sorrow, that spares us sympathetic pain;
but there’s no pleasure in that. If we hear someone loudly
lamenting his misfortunes, and find that when we bring
his case home to ourselves it has no such violent effect on
us, we are shocked at his grief; and because we can’t enter
into it we call it pusillanimity and weakness. [English still
does not mean here what it tends to mean today, namely ‘conformity to
conventional standards of behaviour’. •Smith often uses ‘concord’ as a
musical metaphor, to express the idea of a satisfactory match between
your sentiments and mine, in contrast to a discord or ‘dissonance’. We’ll
see in due course that he uses musical metaphors a lot. e.g. on page 10
where we find ‘flatten’ ([). ‘sharpness’ (]), ‘tone’, ‘harmony’, and ‘concord’
in one short sentence.]
When someone’s passions are in perfect concord with
the sympathetic emotions of the spectator, they necessarily
strike the spectator as being just and proper, and suitable to
their •objects; and if on the other hand the spectator finds
that when he brings the case home to himself those passions
don’t coincide with what he feels, they necessarily appear to
him unjust and improper, and unsuitable to the •causes that
arouse them. Expressing approval of someone’s passions
as suitable to their •objects is the same thing as saying
that we entirely sympathize with them; and disapproving
them as not suitable to their •objects is the same thing as
saying that we don’t entirely sympathize with them. [Smith
does not distinguish a passion’s ‘object’ from its ‘cause’.] The man
who resents the injuries that have been done to me, and
sees that I resent them precisely as he does, necessarily
contains ‘pusillanimous’, from Latin meaning ‘small mind’; here it means
And on the other
side, if we see someone being too happy or too much elevated
(we think) over some little piece of good fortune, this irritates
us. . . . We are even annoyed if our companion laughs louder
or longer at a joke than we think it deserves—i.e. longer than
we feel that we could laugh at it.
something like ‘weak-spirited, lacking in gumption’.]
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approves of my resentment. . . . He who admires a picture
or poem in the way I do must surely admit the justness
of my admiration. He who laughs along with me at a joke
can’t very well deny the propriety of my laughter. And on
the other hand, someone who in such cases either feels no
emotion such as I feel, or feels none that have a level of
intensity anywhere near to mine, can’t avoid disapproving
my sentiments because of their dissonance with his own. . . .
If my grief exceeds what his most tender compassion can go
along with, if my admiration is either too high or too low to
fit with his, if I laugh heartily when he only smiles, or I only
smile when he laughs heartily—in all these cases, as soon
as he moves from considering the object to seeing how I am
affected by it, I must incur some degree of his disapproval
depending on how much disproportion there is between his
sentiments and mine. On all occasions his own sentiments
are the standards and measures by which he judges mine.
Approving of another man’s opinions—adopting those
opinions—they are the same thing! If the arguments that
convince you convince me too, I necessarily approve of your
conviction; and if they don’t, I necessarily disapprove of
it. . . . Everyone accepts that approving or disapproving
of the opinions of others is observing the agreement or
disagreement of those opinions with our own. Well, this is
equally the case with regard to our approval or disapproval
of the sentiments or passions of others.
[Smith mentions a class of counter-examples. •I see that
the joke is funny and that I would ordinarily laugh at it,
but right now I’m not in the mood for jokes. •Someone is
pointed out to me on the street as grieving for the recent
death of his father; I can’t share in his grief, because I don’t
know him or his father; but I don’t doubt that if I were fully
informed of all the details of his situation I would fully and
sincerely sympathize with him. Smith continues:] The basis
1: The Propriety of Action
for my approval of his sorrow is my consciousness of this
conditional sympathy, although the actual sympathy doesn’t
take place. . . .
The sentiment or affection of the heart that leads to some
action can be considered in two different relations: (1) in
relation to the cause that arouses it, or the motive that
gives rise to it; (2) in relation to the end that it proposes, or
the effect that it tends to produce. [Smith builds into this
one-sentence paragraph a striking clause saying that the
‘whole virtue or vice’ of the action ‘must ultimately depend’
on the sentiment or affection of the heart that leads to it.
And in the next paragraph he says it again:]
The propriety or impropriety. . . .of the consequent action
consists in the suitableness or unsuitableness, the proportion or disproportion, that the affection seems to bear to the
cause or object that arouses it.
The merit or demerit of the action, the qualities by which
it is entitled to reward or deserving of punishment, consists
in the beneficial or harmful nature of the effects that the
affection aims at or tends to produce.
In recent years philosophers have focussed on the
•behavioural upshots of affections, to the neglect of an affection’s relation to the •cause that arouses it. But in everyday
life when we judge someone’s conduct and the sentiments
that directed it we constantly consider them under both
these aspects. When we blame someone’s excesses of love,
of grief, of resentment, we consider not only the ruinous
effects that they tend to produce but also the slightness of
their causes. ‘The merit of his favourite’, we say, ‘is not so
great, his misfortune is not so dreadful, his provocation is
not so extraordinary, as to justify such violent passion. We
would have approved or at least indulged the violence of his
emotion if its cause had been anything like proportional to
it.’
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When in this way we judge any affection to be or not be
proportional to the cause that arouses it, we are judging by
the corresponding affection in ourselves when we bring the
case home to our own breast—what other criterion could we
possibly use?. . . .
A man uses each of his faculties as the standard by which
he judges the same faculty in someone else. I judge your
sight by my sight, your ear by my ear, your reason by my
reason, your resentment by my resentment, your love by my
love. I don’t have—I can’t have—any other way of judging
them.
1: The Propriety of Action
the various appearances that the great machine of the
universe is perpetually exhibiting, with their secret
causes
—all the general subjects of science and taste are what we
and the other person regard as having no special relation
to either of us. We both look at them from the same point
of view, and we can produce the most perfect harmony of
sentiments and affections without any help from sympathy
or the imaginary switch of situations from which sympathy
arises. If despite this our affections are often different, this
is either because •our different habits of life lead us to give
different degrees of attention to the various parts of those
complex objects, or •we differ in the natural acuteness of the
mental faculties to which the objects are addressed.
When our companion’s sentiments coincide with our
own over things like this—things that are obvious and
easy, things that everyone would respond to in the same
way—we do of course approve of his sentiments, but they
don’t entitle him to praise or admiration. But when they
don’t just coincide with our own but lead and direct our
own; when in forming them he appears to have attended
to many things that we had overlooked, and to have made
them responsive to all the various details of their objects;
we not only approve of his sentiments but wonder and are
surprised at their uncommon and unexpected acuteness
and comprehensiveness. In this case he appears to deserve
a high degree of •admiration and •applause. For approval
heightened by wonder and surprise constitutes the sentiment
that is properly called •‘admiration’, the natural expression
of it being •applause. [In this next sentence and in many further
Chapter 4: The same continued
There are two different classes of cases in which we judge
the propriety or impropriety of someone else’s sentiments
by their correspondence or disagreement with our own. (1)
In one class, the objects that arouse the sentiments are
considered without any special relation to ourselves or to the
person whose sentiments we are judging. (2) In the other,
those objects ·or causes· are considered as specially affecting
one or other of us.
(1) With regard to objects that are considered without any
special relation either to ourselves or to the person whose
sentiments we are judging: wherever his sentiments entirely
correspond with our own, we credit him with having taste
and good judgment.
The beauty of a plain,
the greatness of a mountain,
the ornaments of a building,
the expression of a picture,
the composition of a speech,
the conduct of a third person,
the proportions of different quantities and numbers,
places, ‘ugliness’ replaces Smith’s ‘deformity’, and similarly with ‘ugly’
and ‘deformed’. That clearly is what he means by ‘deformed’ and ‘deformity’; like some other writers of his time he seems to have preferred
those two words over ‘ugly’ and ‘ugliness’, which occur only once each
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The verdict of the man who judges that
exquisite beauty is preferable to gross ugliness, or that twice
two are equal to four, must certainly be approved of by us
all but surely we won’t much admire it. What arouses our
admiration, and seems to deserve our applause is
1: The Propriety of Action
(2) With regard to objects that affect in some special
way either ourselves or the person whose sentiments we
are judging, it’s •harder to preserve this matching of sentiments and also •vastly more important to do so. ·Harder·:
When I suffer some misfortune or am done some injury,
my companion doesn’t naturally take the same view of this
as I do. It affects me much more nearly. He and I don’t
see it from the same vantage-point, as we do a picture, a
poem, or a scientific theory, so we are apt to be differently
affected by it. ·More important·: A lack of correspondence
of our sentiments with regard to objects that don’t concern
either me or my companion is easier for me to take than
such a lack with regard to something that concerns me
as much as the misfortune that I have encountered or the
injury that has been done to me. There’s not much danger
that you and I will quarrel over a picture, a poem, or even
a scientific theory that I admire and you despise. Neither
of us can reasonably care very much about them. They
ought all of them to be matters of little significance to us
both, so that although our opinions may be opposite we
may still have friendly feelings towards one another. But it’s
quite otherwise with regard to objects by which one of us
is especially affected. Though your judgments in matters
of theory or your sentiments in matters of taste are quite
opposite to mine, I can easily overlook this opposition; and if
I’m not temperamentally angry and quarrelsome I may still
enjoy conversation with you, even on those very subjects.
But if you have no fellow-feeling for the misfortunes I have
met with, or none that bears any proportion to the grief that
is consuming me, or if you have no indignation at the injuries
I have suffered, or none that bears any proportion to the
resentment that is taking me over, the two of us can’t talk
together about this subject. We become intolerable to one
another. . . . You are bewildered by my violence and passion,
in this entire work.]
•the acute and delicate discernment of the man of
taste, who distinguishes the tiny barely perceptible
differences of beauty and ugliness; and
•the comprehensive accuracy of the experienced mathematician, who easily unravels the most intricate and
puzzling proportions.
In short, the greater part of the praise we give to what are
called ‘the intellectual virtues’ goes to the great leader in
science and taste, the man who directs and leads our own
sentiments, and fills us with astonished wonder and surprise
by the extent and superior soundness of his talents.
You may think that what first recommend those talents
to us is their utility; and no doubt the thought of their
utility does give them a new value, once we get around to
it. But at the start we approve of another man’s judgment
not as •useful but as •right, precise, agreeable to truth and
reality; and it’s obvious that we attribute those qualities to
his judgment simply because it agrees with our own. In
the same way, taste is initially approved of not as •useful
but as •just, delicate, and precisely suited to its object. The
thought that such qualities as these are useful is clearly
an after-thought, not what first recommends them to our
approval.
[We are about to meet the word ‘injury’. Its meaning in Smith’s day
was in one way •broader and in another •narrower than its meaning
today. •It wasn’t even slightly restricted to physical injury; it covered
every kind of harm, though only when •the harm was caused by a
person.]
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Adam Smith
and I am enraged by your cold lack of feeling.
In any such case, what is needed for there to be some
correspondence of sentiments between the spectator and
his companion is for the spectator to try his hardest to put
himself in the other man’s situation and to bring home to
himself every little detail of distress that could possibly have
occurred to the sufferer. He must adopt the situation of
his companion with all its tiniest details, and try to make
as perfect as possible the imaginary change of situation on
which his sympathy is based.
Even after all this, the spectator’s emotions won’t be
as violent as the sufferer’s. Although people are naturally
sympathetic, they never respond to what has happened to another person with the level of passion that naturally animates
that person himself. [A couple of dozen times Smith refers to the
1: The Propriety of Action
same as original sorrow, because the sympathizer’s secret
awareness that he is only imagining being in the sufferer’s
position doesn’t just lower the degree ·of intensity· of his
sympathetic sentiment but also makes it somewhat different
in kind. Still, it’s clear that these two sentiments correspond
with one another well enough for the harmony of society.
They won’t ever be unisons, but they can be concords, and
this is all that is wanted or required.
In order to produce this concord, nature teaches the
spectators to take on the situation of the sufferer, and
teaches the sufferer to go some way in taking on the situation
of the spectators. Just as they are continually placing themselves in his situation and thereby experiencing emotions
similar to his, so he is as constantly placing himself in
their situation and thereby experiencing some degree of
the coolness that he’s aware they will have regarding his
fortune. They constantly think about what they would feel
if they actually were the sufferers, and he is constantly led
to imagine how he would be affected if he were one of the
spectators. . . . The effect of this is to lower the violence of his
passion, especially when he is in their presence and under
their observation.
A result of this is that the mind is rarely so disturbed that
the company of a friend won’t restore it to some degree of
tranquillity. The breast is somewhat calmed and composed
the moment we come into our friend’s presence. . . . We
expect less sympathy from an ordinary acquaintance than
from a friend; we can’t share with the acquaintance all
the little details that we can unfold to a friend; so when
we are with the acquaintance we calm down and try to
fix our thoughts on the general outlines of our situation
that he is willing to consider. We expect still less sympathy
from a gathering of strangers, so in their presence we calm
down even further, trying—as we always do—to bring down
latter as ‘the person principally concerned’. This will usually be replaced
by the shorter ‘the sufferer’, a label that Smith also uses quite often.]
The imaginary change of situation on which their sympathy
is based is only momentary. The thought of their own safety,
the thought that they aren’t really the sufferers, continually
pushes into their minds; and though this doesn’t prevent
them from having a passion somewhat analogous to what the
sufferer feels, it does prevent them from coming anywhere
near to matching the level of intensity of his passion. The
sufferer is aware of this, while passionately wanting a more
complete sympathy. He longs for the relief that he can only
get from the perfect concord of the spectators’ affections with
his own. . . . But his only chance of getting this is to lower his
passion to a level at which the spectators are capable of going
along with him. He must flatten (if I may put it this way) the
sharpness of his passion’s natural tone so as to bring it into
harmony and concord with the emotions of the people he is
with. What they feel will always be in some respects different
from what he feels. Compassion can never be exactly the
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Adam Smith
our passion to a pitch that the people we are with may be
expected to go along with. We don’t just seem to calm down.
If we are at all masters of ourselves, the presence of a mere
acquaintance really will compose us more than that of a
friend; and the presence of a gathering of strangers will
compose us even more.
So, at any time when the mind has lost its tranquillity,
the best cures are •society and •conversation. They are also
the best preservatives of the balanced and happy frame of
mind that is so necessary for self-satisfaction and enjoyment.
Scholarly recluses who are apt to sit at home brooding
over either grief or resentment, though they may have more
humaneness, more generosity, and a more delicate sense of
honour, seldom possess the evenness of temperament that
is so common among men of the world.
1: The Propriety of Action
We have here two different efforts—(1) the spectator’s effort
to enter into the sentiments of the sufferer, and (2) the
sufferer’s efforts to bring his emotions down to a level where
the spectator can go along with them. These are the bases
for two different sets of virtues. (1) One is the basis for
the soft, gentle, likeable virtues, the virtues of openness
to others and indulgent humaneness. (2) The other is
the source of the great, awe-inspiring and respectworthy
virtues, the virtues of self-denial and self-control—i.e. the
command of our passions that subjects all the movements
of our nature to the requirements of our own dignity and
honour, and the propriety of our own conduct. [Smith’s words
(1) Someone whose sympathetic heart seems to echo all
the sentiments of those he is in contact with, who grieves for
their calamities, resents their injuries, and rejoices at their
good fortune—how likeable he seems to be! When we bring
home to ourselves the situation of his companions, we enter
into their gratitude and feel what consolation they must get
from the tender sympathy of such an affectionate friend. As
for someone whose hard and stubborn heart feels for no-one
but himself, and who has no sense of the happiness or misery
of others—how disagreeable he seems to be! Here again we
enter into the pain that his presence must give to everyone
who has anything to do with him, and especially to those
with whom we are most apt to sympathize, the unfortunate
and the injured.
(2) Now consider someone who, in his own case, exerts
the togetherness and self-control that constitute the dignity
of every passion, bringing it down to what others can enter
into—what noble propriety and grace do we feel in his conduct! We’re disgusted with the clamorous grief that bluntly
calls on our compassion with sighs and tears and begging
lamentations. But we reverence the reserved, silent, majestic
sorrow that reveals itself only in the swelling of the eyes, in
the quivering of the lips and cheeks, and in the distant yet
touching coolness of the whole behaviour. It imposes the
same silence on us. We regard it with respectful attention,
and keep a cautious watch on our own behaviour lest we
should do anything to disturb the over-all tranquillity that it
takes such an effort to maintain.
On the other side, there is nothing more detestable than
the insolence and brutality of the anger of someone who
indulges its fury without check or restraint. [We are about
are ‘amiable’ and ‘respectable’, but their present meanings—especially
to meet the word ‘generous’, used—as it often is by Smith—in a sense
of ‘respectable’—would make them too distracting. Regarding ‘propriety’:
that it doesn’t often have today: ‘noble-minded, magnanimous, free from
remind yourself of the note on page 116.]
meanness or prejudice’.]
Chapter 5: Likeable and respectworthy virtues
11
But we admire the noble and generous
The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
resentment that •governs its pursuit of ·the author of· great
injuries not by the rage that such injuries are apt to arouse
in the breast of the sufferer, but by the indignation that they
naturally call forth in the breast of an impartial spectator;
that •allows no word or gesture to escape it that wouldn’t be
dictated by this more equitable sentiment [i.e. by the feelings of
an impartial spectator]; that •never, even in thought, attempts
any greater vengeance or wants to inflict any greater punishment than what every person who isn’t directly involved
would be happy to see inflicted.
·Putting those two sets of virtues together· we get the
result that to feel much for others and little for ourselves,
to restrain our selfish affections and indulge our benevolent
affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature. It
is only through this that men can have the harmony of
sentiments and passions that constitutes their whole grace
and propriety. The great law of Christianity is
Love your neighbour as you love yourself;
and the great precept of nature is
Love yourself only as you love your neighbour
—or, what comes to the same thing, as your neighbour is
capable of loving you.
Just as taste and good judgment, when considered as
qualities that deserve praise and admiration, are supposed to
imply an uncommon delicacy of sentiment and acuteness of
understanding, so the virtues of sensitivity and self-control
are thought of as consisting in uncommon degrees of those
qualities. The likeable virtue of humaneness requires, surely,
a level of sensitivity far higher than is possessed by crude
ordinary people. The great and exalted virtue of magnanimity
undoubtedly demands a much higher degree of self-control
than the weakest of mortals could exert. Just as the common level of intellect doesn’t involve any notable talents,
so the common level of moral qualities doesn’t involve any
1: The Propriety of Action
virtues. Virtue is excellence—something uncommonly great
and beautiful, rising far above what is vulgar and ordinary.
The likeable virtues consist in a degree of sensitivity that
surprises us by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy and
tenderness. The awe-inspiring and respectworthy virtues
consist in a degree of self-control that astonishes us by its
amazing superiority over the most ungovernable passions of
human nature.
We here encounter the considerable difference between
•virtue and mere •propriety; between the qualities and actions that deserve to be •admired and celebrated, and the
qualities that merely deserve to be •approved of. To act with
the most perfect propriety often requires no more than the
common and ordinary degree of sensitivity or self-control that
even the most worthless of mankind have, and sometimes
not even that is needed. To give a humdrum example: in
ordinary circumstances if you are hungry it is perfectly right
and proper for you to eat, and everyone would agree about
that; but no-one would call your eating virtuous!
·Thus, there can be perfect propriety without virtue. And
there can also be virtue without perfect propriety·. Actions
that fall short of perfect propriety often have a good deal
of virtue in them, because they are nearer to perfection
than could well be expected in a context where perfection
of conduct would be extremely difficult to attain; this is
often the case in situations calling for the greatest efforts
of self-control. Some situations put so much pressure on
human nature that none of us, imperfect creatures that we
are, is capable of the degree of self-control that is ·called for.
I mean: the degree that is needed· to silence the voice of
human weakness, or reduce the violence of the passions to a
level where the impartial spectator can entirely share them.
In such a case, though the sufferer’s behaviour falls short
of the most perfect propriety, it may deserve some applause
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Adam Smith
and even qualify as (in a certain sense) ‘virtuous’, because it
shows an effort of high-mindedness and magnanimity that
most men are not capable of. . . .
In cases of this kind, when we are settling how much
blame or applause an action deserves, we often use two
different standards. (1) One standard is the idea of complete
propriety and perfection, which in these difficult situations
no human conduct could ever achieve. . . . (2) The other standard is the idea of the nearness to this complete perfection
1: The Propriety of Action
that the actions of most men commonly achieve. Whatever
goes beyond this seems to deserve applause, and whatever
falls short of it to deserve blame.
[Smith adds a paragraph about a similar double standard
in judging works of art that ‘address themselves to the imagination’: •the idea of complete but not humanly attainable
perfection that the critic has in his mind, and •the idea of
how near to complete perfection most works of art get.]
Section 2: Allowable degrees of passions
Introduction
are others of which the strongest •expressions are often ·so
proper as to count as· extremely graceful, even though the
passions themselves aren’t necessarily •felt so strongly. The
(1) passions are the ones with which, for certain reasons,
there is little or no sympathy; the (2) passions are those with
which, for other reasons, there is the greatest sympathy.
And if we consider the whole range of passions that human
nature is capable of, we’ll find that they are regarded as
decent (or indecent) exactly in proportion as mankind are
more (or less) disposed to sympathize with them.
For a passion aroused by an object that is specially related
to oneself, the proper level of intensity—the level at which
the spectator can go along with it—is clearly somewhere
in the middle [Smith: ‘. . . must lie in a certain mediocrity’]. If the
passion is too high, or too low, the spectator can’t enter into
it. Grief and resentment for private misfortunes and injuries
can easily be too high, and in most people they are. They
aren’t often too low, but this can happen. We call too-high
passion ‘weakness’ and ‘fury’, and we call too-low passion
‘stupidity’, ‘insensibility’, and ‘lack of spirit’. We can’t enter
into either of them, and are astonished and confused to see
them.
This middling level that is needed for propriety is different
for different passions. It is high for some, low for others.
(1) There are some passions that it is indecent to •express
very strongly, even when it is acknowledged that we can’t
avoid •feeling them in the highest degree. (2) And there
Chapter 1: The passions that originate in the body
(1) It is indecent to express any strong degree of •the passions
that arise from a certain situation or disposition of one’s
body, because the people one is with aren’t in that bodily
state and so can’t be expected to sympathize with •them.
Violent hunger, for example, though on many occasions it’s
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Adam Smith
not only natural but unavoidable, is always indecent, and
to eat voraciously is universally regarded as a piece of ill
manners. Still, there is some level of sympathy even with
hunger. It is agreeable to see our companions eat with a
•good appetite; any expression of •loathing for the food one
has tasted is offensive. A healthy man’s normal bodily state
makes his stomach easily keep time (forgive the coarseness!)
with •one and not with •the other. We can sympathize
with the distress of excessive hunger when we read the
description of a siege or sea-voyage. Imagining ourselves
in the situation of the sufferers, we can easily conceive the
•grief, fear and consternation that must necessarily distract
them. We ourselves feel some degree of •those passions, and
therefore sympathize with them; but reading the description
doesn’t make us hungry, so it’s not strictly accurate to say
that we sympathize with their hunger.
It’s the same with the passion by which Nature unites
the sexes. Though it is naturally the most furious of all
the passions, strong expressions of it are always indecent,
even between persons who are totally allowed, by human
and divine laws, to indulge this passion together. Still, there
seems to be some degree of sympathy even with this passion.
It is not proper to talk to a woman as we would to a man;
it is expected that their company should inspire us with
more gaiety, more pleasantry, and more attention; and an
entire insensibility to the fair sex makes a man somewhat
contemptible even to men. [This paragraph seems to run together
1: The Propriety of Action
lower animals, so that they are beneath our dignity because
they have no connection with the characteristic qualities of
human nature. But there are many other passions that we
have in common with the lower animals—e.g. resentment,
natural affection, even gratitude—that don’t strike us as
animal-like. The real cause of the special disgust we have
for the body’s appetites when we see them in other men is
that we can’t enter into them, ·can’t sympathize with them·.
To the person who has such a passion, as soon as it is
gratified the object that aroused it ceases to be agreeable;
even its presence often becomes offensive to him; he looks in
vain for the charm that swept him away the moment before,
and he can’t now enter into his own passion any more than
anyone else can. After we have dined, we order the table
to be cleared; and we would treat in the same manner the
objects of the most ardent and passionate desires if they
were the objects only of passions that originate in the body.
The virtue of temperance, properly so-called, is the command of the body’s appetites. •Prudence involves keeping
those appetites within the limits required by •a concern
for one’s health and fortune. But •temperance keeps them
within the limits required by •grace, propriety, delicacy, and
modesty.
(2) It’s for that same reason that it always seems unmanly
and unbecoming to cry out with bodily pain, however intolerable it is. Yet there is a good deal of sympathy even
with bodily pain. I remarked earlier that if I see a truncheon
about to come down on someone else’s arm, I naturally
shrink and draw back my own arm; and when the blow falls
I feel it in some measure, and I am hurt by it as well as the
sufferer. But my hurt is very slight, so that if he makes a
violent outcry I will despise him because I can’t go along with
him. That’s how it is with all the passions that originate in
the body; they arouse ·in the spectator· either no sympathy
•sympathy with my female companion’s sexual feelings with •sensitivity
to the fact that my companion is female. This oddity is present in the
original; it’s not an artifact of this version.]
We have such an aversion for all the appetites that originate in the body that we find all strong expressions of them
loathsome and disagreeable. Some ancient philosophers
held that these are the passions that we share with the
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1: The Propriety of Action
the word·) but the idea of the imagination (·the meaning of
the word·); and just because it is an idea, the thought of it
continues to fret and ruffle the imagination until time and
other episodes in some measure erase it from our memory, .
Pain never evokes any lively sympathy unless danger
comes with it. We sympathize with sufferer’s fear but not
with his agony. Fear is a passion derived entirely from
the imagination, which represents not what we really now
feel but what we may suffer later on. (It represents this in
an uncertain and fluctuating way, but that only makes it
worse.) The gout or the tooth-ache, though intensely painful,
arouse little sympathy; more dangerous diseases, even when
accompanied by little pain, arouse sympathy in the highest
degree.
Some people faint and grow sick at the sight of a surgical
operation; the bodily pain caused by tearing the flesh seems
to arouse the most excessive sympathy in them. We do
conceive in a much more lively and distinct manner the
pain that comes from an external cause than pain coming
from an internal disorder. I can hardly form an idea of
my neighbour’s agonies when he is tortured by gout or a
gallstone; but I have the clearest conception of what he must
suffer from an incision, a wound, or a fracture. But the main
reason why such objects produce such violent effects on us
·as spectators· is that we aren’t used to them. Someone
who has seen a dozen dissections and as many amputations
will from then on see all operations of this kind with great
calmness and often with no feeling at all for the sufferer. . . .
Some of the Greek tragedies try to arouse compassion by
representing the agonies of bodily pain. Philoctetes cries out
and faints from the extremity of his sufferings. Hippolytus
and Hercules are both introduced as dying from the severest
tortures—ones that seem to have been more than even the
fortitude of Hercules could bear. But in all these cases,
at all or such a low level of sympathy that it is altogether
disproportionate to the violence of what the sufferer feels.
It is quite otherwise with passions that originate in the
imagination. The state of my •body can’t be much affected
by changes that are brought about in my companion’s body;
but my •imagination is more pliable, and (so to speak) more
readily takes on the shape and lay-out of the imaginations of
people I have contact with. That’s why a disappointment in
love or ambition will evoke more sympathy than the greatest
bodily evil. Those passions arise purely from the imagination.
The person who has lost his whole fortune, if he is in good
health, feels nothing in his body. What he suffers comes
entirely from his imagination, which represents to him the
rapid approach of the loss of his dignity, neglect by his
friends, contempt from his enemies, dependency, poverty
and misery; and we sympathize with him more strongly on
account of this misfortune ·than we do for any physical pain
he is suffering· because it’s easier for our imaginations to
mould themselves on his imagination than for our bodies to
mould themselves on his body.
The loss of a leg may generally be regarded as a more
real calamity than the loss of a mistress. Yet it would
be a ridiculous ·dramatic· tragedy of which the ·central·
catastrophe was to concern the loss of a leg; whereas a
misfortune of the other kind, however trivial it may appear
to be, has given occasion to many a fine tragic drama.
Nothing is as quickly forgotten as pain. The moment it is
gone the whole agony of it is over, and the thought of it can
no longer give us any sort of disturbance. After the pain is
over, we ourselves can’t enter into the anxiety and anguish
that we had during it. An unguarded word from a friend
will cause a more durable unhappiness—the agony it creates
is by no means over once the word has gone. What at first
disturbs us is not the object of the senses (·the sound of
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what concerns us is not the pain but other features of the
situation. What affects us is not Philoctetes’s sore foot but
his solitude, which diffuses over that charming tragedy the
romantic wildness that is so agreeable to the imagination.
The agonies of Hercules and Hippolytus are interesting only
because we foresee that death will result from them. If
those heroes recovered, we would think the representation of
their sufferings to have been perfectly ridiculous. . . . These
attempts to arouse compassion by the representation of
bodily pain may be regarded as among the Greek theatre’s
greatest failures of good manners.
The propriety of constancy and patience in enduring
bodily pain is based on the fact that we feel little sympathy
with such pain. The man who under the severest tortures
allows no weakness to escape him, who doesn’t utter a
groan or give way to any passion that we ·spectators· don’t
entirely enter into, commands our highest admiration. His
firmness enables him to keep time with our indifference
and insensibility. We admire and entirely go along with
the magnanimous effort that he makes for this purpose. We
•approve of his behaviour, and our experience of the common
weakness of human nature makes us •surprised by it, and
we wonder what enabled him to act so as to deserve approval.
Approval, mixed with an enlivening input of wonder and
surprise, constitutes the sentiment that is properly called
‘admiration’, of which applause—I repeat—is the natural
expression.
1: The Propriety of Action
originate in a special turn or habit that the imagination
has acquired. The imaginations of people in general, not
having acquired that particular turn, can’t enter into these
passions. The passions in question, though they may be
allowed to be almost unavoidable in some part of life, are
always somewhat ridiculous. An example is the strong
attachment that naturally grows up between two persons of
different sexes who have long fixed their thoughts on one
another. Because our imagination hasn’t run in the same
channel as the lover’s, we can’t enter into the eagerness of
his emotions. •If our friend has been injured, we readily
sympathize with his resentment and grow angry with the
person with whom he is angry. •If he has received a benefit,
we readily enter into his gratitude and have a high sense of
the merit of his benefactor. But •if he is in love, even though
we may think his passion is just as reasonable as any of that
kind, we don’t think ourselves bound to develop a passion
of the same kind and for the same person that he is in love
with. To everyone but the lover himself his passion seems
entirely disproportionate to the value of its object; and love,
though it is •pardoned. . . .because we know it is natural, is
always •laughed at because we can’t enter into it. All serious
and strong expressions of it appear ridiculous to a third
person; and a lover isn’t good company to anyone else except
his mistress. He himself is aware of this, and during his
periods of being in his sober senses he tries to treat his own
passion with mockery and ridicule. That is the only style in
which we care to •hear of it, because it’s the only style in
which we ourselves are disposed to •talk of it. We grow weary
of the solemn, pedantic, long-winded lovers of Cowley and
of Petrarch, who go on and on exaggerating the violence of
their attachments; but the gaiety of Ovid and the gallantry
of Horace are always agreeable.
Chapter 2: The passions that originate in a particular turn or habit of the imagination
Even some of the passions derived from the imagination
get little sympathy, although they may be acknowledged
to be perfectly natural. I’m talking about passions that
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But though we feel no proper sympathy with an attachment of this kind, though we never get close to imagining
ourselves as in love with that particular person, ·we aren’t
entirely cut off from the lover’s situation·. We have ourselves
fallen in love in that way, or are disposed to do so; and that
lets us readily enter into the high hopes of happiness that
the lover expects from his love’s gratification, as well as into
the intense distress that he fears from its disappointment. It
concerns us not as a passion but as a situation that gives
rise to other passions that concern us—to hope, fear, and
distress of every kind. (Similarly, when we read about a
sea voyage, our concern is not with the hunger but with the
distress that the hunger causes.) Without properly entering
into the lover’s attachment, we readily go along with the
expectations of romantic happiness that he gets from it. We
feel how natural it is for the mind, at a time when it is lazily
relaxed and fatigued with the violence of desire,
to long for serenity and quiet, to hope to find them
in the gratification of the passion that distracts it,
and to form for itself the idea of a life of pastoral
tranquillity and retirement of the sort that the elegant,
tender, and passionate ·Latin poet· Tibullus takes so
much pleasure in describing—a life like the one the
·ancient· poets describe in the Fortunate Islands, a
life of friendship, liberty, and repose; free from labour,
from care, and from all the turbulent passions that
accompany them.
Even scenes of this kind engage us most when they are
depicted as •hoped for rather than •actually enjoyed. The
grossness of the passion that is mixed in with love and is
perhaps its foundation disappears when its gratification is
far off and at a distance; but when it is described as what
is immediately possessed it makes the whole description
offensive. For this reason [he means: because of the grossness of
1: The Propriety of Action
lust] we are less drawn into the lover’s happy passion than
we are to the fearful and the melancholy ·aspects of it·.
We tremble for whatever can disappoint such natural and
agreeable hopes, and thus enter into all the anxiety, concern,
and distress of the lover.
[Smith now has a paragraph applying this line of thought
to the presentation of romantic love ‘in some modern
tragedies and romances’. Then:]
The reserve that the laws of society impose on the female
sex with regard to this weakness [i.e. with regard to romantic
love] makes it especially stressful for them; and for just that
reason we are more deeply concerned with their part in a
love situation. We are charmed with the •love of Phaedra as it
is expressed in Racine’s Phèdre, despite all the extravagance
and guilt that come with it. That very extravagance and guilt
are part of what recommends •it to us. Her fear, shame,
remorse, horror, despair, become thereby more natural and
engaging. All the secondary passions (if I may be allowed to
call them that) that arise from the situation of love become
necessarily more furious and violent, and it’s only with
these secondary passions that we can properly be said to
sympathize.
However, of all the passions that are so extravagantly
disproportionate to the value of their objects, love is the only
one that appears to have anything in it that is either graceful
or agreeable. (None of the others do, even to the weakest
minds!) ·It has three things going for it·:
•Although it may be ridiculous, it isn’t naturally odious.
•Although its consequences are often fatal and dreadful
its intentions are seldom bad.
•Although there is little propriety in the passion itself,
there’s a good deal of propriety in some of the passions
that always accompany it.
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There is in love a strong mixture of humaneness, generosity, kindness, friendship, esteem. And these are the
passions that we are most disposed to sympathize with, even
when we’re aware that they are somewhat excessive. The
sympathy that we feel with them makes the passion that
they accompany less disagreeable and supports it in our
imagination, despite all the vices that commonly go along
with it: always eventual ruin and infamy for the woman;
and for the man—though he is supposed to come off more
lightly—it usually causes inability to work, neglect of duty,
disregard of ·lost· reputation. [In the original, as in this version,
1: The Propriety of Action
all their varieties. With all such passions our sympathy is
divided between the person who feels them and the person
who is the object of them. The interests of these two are
directly opposite. What our sympathy with the person who
feels the passion would prompt us to •wish for is something
that our fellow-feeling with the other person would lead us
to •fear. Because they are both human we are concerned
for both, and our fear for what one may suffer damps our
resentment for what the other has suffered. So our sympathy
with the man who has received the provocation has to fall
short of the passion that naturally animates him, not only
for the general reason that all sympathetic passions are
inferior to the original ones, but also for the special reason
that in this case we also have an opposite sympathy towards
someone else. That is why resentment, more than almost any
other passion, can’t become graceful and agreeable unless
it is humbled and brought down below the pitch to which it
would naturally rise.
Any human being has a strong sense of the injuries that
are done to anyone else; the villain in a tragedy or romance is
as much an object of our indignation as the hero is an object
of our sympathy and affection. We detest Iago as much as we
esteem Othello; and we delight as much in Iago’s punishment
as we grieve over Othello’s distress. But although we have
such a strong fellow-feeling with the injuries that are done
to our brethren, it’s not always the case that our resentment
grows if the sufferer’s grows. ·On the contrary·, the •greater
his patience, mildness, and humaneness, the •greater our
resentment against the person who injured him—provided
that his patience etc. doesn’t seem to show that he is afraid
or that he lacks spirit. The likeableness of the sufferer’s
character intensifies our sense of the atrocity of the injury.
However, those passions are regarded as necessary elements in human nature. A person becomes contemptible if
Smith doesn’t signal where he is switching from romantic love generally
to what he is evidently thinking of here—consummated romantic love
Despite all
this, the degree of sensibility and generosity that is supposed
to accompany such love makes it something that some people
are vain about—they like to appear to be capable of a feeling
that would do them no honour if they really did have it.
It’s for this kind of reason that a certain reserve is
necessary when we talk of our own friends, our own studies,
our own professions. We can’t expect our companions to be
as interested in these topics as we are. And it’s because of
a lack of this reserve that one half of mankind make bad
company for the other half. A philosopher is good company
only to another philosopher; the member of a club is good
company only to his own little knot of companions.
between two people who are not married to one another.]
Chapter 3: The unsocial passions
There is another set of passions which, though derived from
the imagination, have to be scaled down if we are to be able
to enter into them or regard them as graceful or becoming; I
mean scaled down to a much lower level than undisciplined
nature gives them. These are •hatred and •resentment, with
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he tamely sits still and submits to insults without trying to
repel or revenge them. We can’t enter into his indifference
and insensibility. We regard his behaviour as mean-spirited,
and are really provoked by it, just as much as we are by the
insolence of his adversary. Even the mob are enraged to see
any man submit patiently to insults and bullying. They want
to see this insolence resented by the person who suffers from
it. They angrily cry to him to defend or revenge himself. If
his indignation eventually bubbles up, they heartily applaud,
and sympathize with it. It enlivens their own indignation
against his enemy, whom they rejoice to see him attack in
his turn; and provided his revenge is not immoderate, they
are as really gratified by it as they would be if the injury had
been done to themselves.
1: The Propriety of Action
a palace. But the immediate effect of a prison—namely, the
confinement of the wretches shut up in it—is disagreeable;
and the imagination either doesn’t bother to trace out the
remote consequences, or sees them from too great a distance
to be much affected by them. So a prison will always be
a disagreeable object; and the fitter it is for its intended
purpose the more disagreeable it will be. A palace, on the
other hand, will always be agreeable; and yet its remote
effects may often be thoroughly bad for the public—e.g. promoting luxury, and setting an example of the dissolution of
manners. [In Smith’s day, ‘luxury’ stood for very excessive indulgence
in physical comforts; see note on page 162.]. . . . Paintings or models
of the instruments of music or of agriculture make a common
and an agreeable ornament of our halls and dining-rooms.
A display of that kind composed of the instruments of
surgery—dissecting and amputation-knives, saws for cutting
the bones, trepanning instruments, etc.—would be absurd
and shocking. Yet instruments of surgery are always more
finely polished, and usually more exactly adapted to their
intended purpose, than instruments of agriculture. And
their •remote effect—the health of the patient—is agreeable.
But because their •immediate effect is pain and suffering,
the sight of them always displeases us. [Smith adds that
swords and such are liked, associated with courage etc.,
and even wanted as fashion accessories. It’s true that their
immediate effects are pain and suffering, but only for ‘our
enemies, with whom we have no sympathy’. He continues:] It
is the same with the qualities of the mind. The ancient stoics
held that because the world was governed by the all-ruling
providence of a wise, powerful, and good God, every single
event ought to be regarded as a necessary part of the plan
of the universe, and as tending to promote the general order
and happiness of the whole; so that men’s vices and follies
were as necessary a part of this plan as their wisdom or
•Those passions are useful to the individual, because they
make it dangerous to insult or injure him; and, as I’ll show
later, •they are useful to the public as guardians of justice
and of the equality of its administration; and yet •they have
in themselves something disagreeable that makes it natural
for us to dislike seeing them in other people. Suppose that
we are in company, and someone insults me; if I express
anger that goes beyond merely indicating that I noted the
insult, that is regarded not only as an insult to him but also
as a rudeness to the whole company. Respect for them
ought to have restrained me from giving way to such a
rowdy and offensive emotion. It’s the •remote effects of
these passions that are agreeable; the •immediate effects
are mischief to the person against whom they are directed
[Smith’s phrase]. But what makes an object—·a passion or
anything else·—agreeable or disagreeable to the imagination
is its •immediate effect, not its •remote ones. A prison
is certainly more useful to the public than a palace; and
someone who establishes a prison is generally directed by a
much sounder spirit of patriotism than someone who builds
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their virtue. . . . No theory of this sort, however, no matter
how deeply it might be rooted in the mind, could lessen our
natural abhorrence for vice, whose immediate effects are
so destructive and whose remote ones are too distant to be
traced by the imagination.
It’s the same with hatred and resentment. Their immediate effects are so disagreeable that even when the sufferer is
absolutely entitled to them there’s still something about them
that disgusts us. That’s why these are the only passions
that we aren’t inclined to sympathize with until we learn
about the cause that arouses them. ·In contrast with that·,
the plaintive •voice of misery, when heard at a distance,
won’t let us be indifferent about the person from whom it
comes; as soon as we hear •it we are concerned about his
fortune, and if •it continues it almost forces us to rush to
his assistance. The sight of a smiling face elevates even a
brooding person into a cheerful and airy mood that disposes
him to sympathize with the joy it expresses; and he feels his
heart, which just then had been shrunk and depressed by
thought and care, instantly expanded and elated. [Smith
goes on at colourful length about the different effect on us of
expressions of hatred and resentment. He concludes:] Grief
powerfully •engages and attracts us to the person who is
grieving; and hatred and resentment, while we are ignorant of
their cause, equally powerfully •disgust and detach us from
the person who has them. It seems to have been Nature’s
intention that the rougher and more dislikeable emotions
that drive men apart should be less easily and more rarely
passed on from man to man.
When music imitates the modulations of grief or joy, it
inspires us with those passions, or at least puts us in a
mood that disposes us to have them. But when it imitates
the notes of anger, it inspires us ·not with anger but· with
fear. Joy, grief, love, admiration, devotion, are all naturally
1: The Propriety of Action
musical passions. Their natural tones are all soft, clear, and
melodious; and they naturally express themselves in phrases
that are separated by regular pauses, which makes it easy to
adapt them to them to the words of a song. In contrast with
this, the voice of anger and of all the passions like it is harsh
and discordant. Its phrases are all irregular, some long and
others short, and not marked off by regular pauses. So it is
hard for music to imitate any of those passions; and music
that does so isn’t the most agreeable. There would be no
impropriety in making a complete concert out of imitations
of the social and agreeable passions. It would be a strange
entertainment that consisted of nothing but imitations of
hatred and resentment!
Those passions are as disagreeable to the person who
feels them as they are to the spectator. •Hatred and •anger
are the greatest poison to the happiness of a good mind. In
the very feel of them there is something harsh, jarring, and
convulsive, something that tears and distracts the breast
and is altogether destructive of the calmness of mind that
is so necessary to happiness and is best promoted by the
contrary passions of •gratitude and •love. What generous
and humane people are most apt to regret ·when they are
injured· is not the value of what they lose by the perfidy and
ingratitude of those they live with. Whatever they may have
lost, they can generally be happy without it. What disturbs
them most is the idea of perfidy and ingratitude exercised
towards themselves; and they regard the discordant and
disagreeable passions that this arouses as constituting the
chief part of the injury that they suffer.
What does it take for the gratification of resentment to be
completely agreeable, and to make the spectator thoroughly
sympathize with our revenge? Well, the first thing is that
the provocation must be such that if we didn’t somewhat
resent it we would be making ourselves contemptible and
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1: The Propriety of Action
Chapter 4: The social passions
exposing ourselves to perpetual insults. Smaller offences are
always better neglected; and there’s nothing more despicable
than the quarrelsome temperament that takes fire under the
slightest provocation. ·Secondly·, we should resent more
from a sense of the propriety of resentment—·i.e.· from
a sense that mankind expect and require it of us—than
because we feel in ourselves the furies of that disagreeable
passion. With the passion of resentment—more than any
other of which the human mind is capable—we ought to ask
ourselves sceptically ‘Is it all right for me to feel this?’, letting
our indulgence in it be subject to careful consultation with
our natural sense of propriety, i.e. to diligent consideration
of what will be the sentiments of the cool and impartial
spectator. The only motive that can ennoble the expressions
of this disagreeable passion is magnanimity, i.e. a concern
to maintain our own rank and dignity in society. This motive
must characterize our whole style and deportment. These
must be plain, open, and direct; determined but not domineering, and elevated without insolence; not only free from
petulance and low abusiveness, but generous, fair-minded,
and full of all proper regard even for the person who has
offended us. [In that sentence ‘fair-minded’ replaces Smith’s ‘candid’.
I have just been discussing a set of passions that are on
most occasions ungraceful and disagreeable, being made so
·in large measure· by the •divided sympathy that they evoke.
Now we come to an opposite set of passions—ones that are
nearly always especially agreeable and becoming, being made
so by the •redoubled sympathy that they evoke. Generosity,
humaneness, kindness, compassion, mutual friendship and
esteem—all the social and benevolent affections—when expressed in someone’s face or behaviour, even towards people
who aren’t specially connected with ourselves, please us on
almost every occasion. The impartial spectator’s sympathy
with the person x who feels those passions exactly coincides
with his concern for the person y who is the object of them.
Just by being a man, the spectator is obliged to have a
concern for y’s happiness, and this concern enlivens his
fellow-feeling with x’s sentiments, which also aim at y’s
happiness. So we always have the strongest disposition
to sympathize with the benevolent affections. They strike us
as in every respect agreeable. We enter into the satisfaction
of the person who feels them and of the person who is the
object of them. Just as
being an object of hatred and indignation gives more
pain than all the evil that a brave man can fear from
his enemies,
so also
for a person with fine and sensitive feelings, the awareness that he is loved brings a satisfaction that does
more for his happiness than any ·practical· advantage
he can expect to derive from being loved.
The most detestable character is that of the person who takes
pleasure in sowing dissension among friends, turning their
most tender love into mortal hatred. But what makes this so
He always uses it with that meaning, which is quite remote from what
it means today.] In short, it must appear from our whole
manner—without our laboriously making a special point
of it—that our passion hasn’t extinguished our humaneness,
and that if we answer the call to get revenge we do so with
reluctance, from necessity, and in consequence of great and
repeated provocations. When resentment is guarded and
qualified in this manner it can even count as generous [see
note on page 11] and noble.
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atrocious? Is it that it deprives them of the trivial good turns
they might have expected from one another if friendship had
continued? ·Of course not·! It’s the fact that it deprives
them of that friendship itself, robbing them of each other’s
affections, from which both derived so much satisfaction;
disturbing the harmony of their hearts and ending the happy
relations that had previously held between them. •These
affections, that harmony, these inter-relations, are felt—not
only by tender and delicate people but also by the roughest
ordinary folk—to be more important for happiness than all
the little services that could be expected to flow from •them.
The sentiment of love is in itself agreeable to the person
who feels it. It soothes and calms his breast, and seems. . . .to
promote the healthy state of his constitution; and it is made
still more delightful by his awareness of the gratitude and
satisfaction that his love must arouse in the person who is
the object of it. Their mutual regard makes them happy with
one another, and this mutual regard, added to sympathy,
makes them agreeable to everyone else. Take the case of
a family where mutual love and esteem hold sway
throughout; where the parents and children are companions for one another, with no differences except
what come from the children’s respectful affection
and the parents’ kind indulgence; where freedom and
fondness, mutual teasing and mutual kindness, show
that the brothers are not divided by any opposition
of their interests, or the sisters by any rivalry for
parental favour; and where everything presents us
with the idea of peace, cheerfulness, harmony, and
contentment.
What pleasure we get from seeing a family like that! Then
consider being a visitor to
a household in which jarring contention sets half of
the members against the other half; where, along with
1: The Propriety of Action
the surface appearance of smoothness and good temper, suspicious looks and sudden flashes of passion
reveal the mutual jealousies that burn within them,
ready at any moment to burst out through all the
restraints that the presence of visitors imposes.
What an unpleasant experience that is!
The likeable passions, even when they are clearly excessive, are never regarded with aversion. There’s something
agreeable even in the excess of friendship and humaneness.
The too tender mother, the too indulgent father, the too
generous and affectionate friend, may be looked on with a
sort of pity, though there’s love mixed in with it; and they
can never be regarded with hatred and aversion, or even
with contempt, except by the most brutal and worthless of
mankind. When we blame them for the extravagance of their
attachment, we always do it with concern, with sympathy
and kindness. [Smith goes on to say that our only regret
regarding any extreme case of the social passions is ‘that
it is unfit for the world because the world is unworthy of
it’, so that the person in question is too open to abuse and
ingratitude that he doesn’t deserve and couldn’t easily bear.
He contrasts this with our much more robust disapproval of
extreme hatred and resentment.]
Chapter 5: The selfish passions
Besides those two opposite sets of passions, the social and
the unsocial, there’s a third that occupies a sort of middle
place between them: it’s a kind of passion that is never
as graceful as the social passions sometimes are, or as
odious as the unsocial passions sometimes are. This third
set of passions consists of grief and joy that people have
on account of their own private good or bad fortune. Even
when excessive, these passions are never as disagreeable as
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excessive resentment,
•because no opposing sympathy can ever make us
want to oppose them,
and even when they are most suitable to their objects, these
passions are never as agreeable as impartial humanity and
just benevolence, because
•no double sympathy can ever make us want to
support them.
There’s this difference between grief and joy: we are generally
most disposed to sympathize with small joys and great
sorrows. A man who by some sudden stroke of luck is
instantly raised into a condition of life far above what he had
formerly lived in can be sure that the congratulations of his
best friends aren’t all perfectly sincere. An upstart—even if
he is of the greatest merit—is generally disagreeable to us,
and a sentiment of envy commonly prevents us from heartily
sympathizing with his joy. If he has any judgment he is
aware of this, ·and conducts himself accordingly·. Instead
of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he does
his best to smother his joy, and keep down the mental lift
he is getting, naturally, from his new circumstances. He
dresses as plainly as ever, and displays the same modesty
of behaviour that was suitable to him in his former station.
He redoubles his attention to his old friends, and tries more
than ever to be humble, attentive, and obliging. And this
is the behaviour that we most approve of in someone in
his situation—apparently because we look to him to have
more •sympathy with our envy and aversion to his happiness
than we have •sympathy with his happiness! He hardly ever
succeeds in all this. We suspect the sincerity of his humility,
and he grows weary of this constraint. Before long, he leaves
all his old friends behind him, except perhaps some of the
poorest of them, who are willing to lower themselves to the
level of becoming his dependents. And he doesn’t always
1: The Propriety of Action
acquire new friends; the pride of his new acquaintances is as
much offended at finding him their equal as the pride of his
old ones had been offended by his becoming their superior;
and he’ll have to put up the most obstinate and persevering
·show of· modesty to atone for either offence. He generally
grows weary too soon, and is provoked by the sullen and
suspicious pride of his old friends to treat them with neglect,
by the saucy contempt of his new acquaintances to treat
them with petulance, until eventually he forms a habit of
insolence, and isn’t respected by anyone. If the chief part of
human happiness comes from the consciousness of being
beloved, as I think it does, these sudden changes of fortune
seldom contribute much to happiness. The happiest man is
one who advances more gradually to greatness, whose every
step upwards is widely predicted before he reaches it, so that
when his success comes it can’t arouse extravagant •joy in
himself, and can’t reasonably create •jealousy in those he
overtakes or •envy in those he leaves behind.
We are more apt to sympathize with smaller joys flowing
from less imposing causes. It is decent to be humble amidst
great prosperity; but we can hardly overdo our expressions of
satisfaction in all the little occurrences of common life—the
company we had yesterday evening, the entertainment that
was provided for us, what was said and what was done, all
the little incidents of the present conversation, and all the
trivial nothings that fill up the void of human life. Nothing is
more graceful than habitual cheerfulness, which is always
based on a special liking for all the little pleasures that
everyday events provide. We readily sympathize with it; it
inspires us with the same joy, and makes every trifle present
to us the same agreeable aspect that it presents to the person
endowed with this happy disposition. That is why youth,
the time of gaiety, so easily engages our affections. The
propensity for joy that seems. . . .to sparkle from the eyes of
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1: The Propriety of Action
of similar trivial causes. ·How can there be that difference?·
It’s because our •sympathetic passions are always easier to
resist than our •original ones. Also, human nature includes
a malice that not only •prevents all sympathy with little
unhappinesses but •makes them somewhat amusing. Hence
the delight we all take in teasing, and in the small vexation
that we observe in our companion when he is pushed, and
urged, and teased on all sides. [Smith adds details about how
such matters are managed in society. A ‘man who lives in the
world’, he says, stays in tune with his social surroundings by
teasing himself regarding trivial calamities [Smith calls them
‘frivolous calamities’] that befall him.]
On the other side, our sympathy with deep distress is
strong and sincere. You don’t need me to give examples. We
weep even at the representation of a tragedy on the stage.
So if you are labouring under some notable calamity, if
through some extraordinary misfortune you have fallen into
poverty, disease, disgrace or ·major· disappointment, you
can generally depend on the sincerest sympathy of all your
friends, and on their kindest assistance too as far as their
interests and honour will permit; and that holds even if the
trouble was partly your own fault. But if your misfortune
is not of this dreadful kind, if you have merely been a little
blocked in your ambition, if you have only been jilted by
your mistress, or are only hen-pecked by your wife, you can
reckon on being teased by everyone you know!
youth and beauty—even in a person of the same sex—raises
even elderly people to a more joyous mood than ordinary.
They forget their infirmities for a while, and give themselves
over to agreeable ideas and emotions to which they have
long been strangers, but which return to their breast when
the presence of so much happiness calls them back—like
old acquaintances from whom they are sorry to have ever
been parted, and whom they embrace all the more heartily
because of this long separation.
[Several occurrences of ‘teasing’ that we are about to meet—like
one on page 22—are replacements for Smith’s ‘raillery’, which means
It is quite
otherwise with grief. Small vexations arouse no sympathy,
but deep affliction calls forth the greatest. The man who
is made uneasy by every little disagreeable incident. . . .will
seldom meet with much sympathy. [Smith builds into that
sentence sketches of eight such trivial incidents.] Joy is a
pleasant emotion, and we gladly give ourselves over to it on
the slightest occasion. So we readily sympathize with it in
others except when we are prejudiced by envy. But grief
is painful, and the mind naturally resists and recoils from
it—and that includes resisting being grieved by one’s own
misfortunes. We try either not to be grieved at all, or to
shake our grief off as soon as it comes over us. It’s true that
our aversion to grief won’t always stop us from grieving over
trifling troubles that we meet, but it constantly prevents us
from sympathizing with the grief that others have because
something like ‘lighted-hearted unaggressive mockery’.]
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1: The Propriety of Action
Section 3: How prosperity and adversity affect our judgments about the
rightness of actions; and why it is easier to win our approval in prosperity
than in adversity
Chapter 1: The intensity-difference between joy
and sympathy with joy is less than the intensitydifference between sorrow and sympathy with
sorrow
the fact that our sympathy with pleasure often comes close
to the natural vivacity of the original passion.
Over and above all this, we often struggle to keep down
our sympathy with the sorrow of others. When we aren’t
in the presence of the sufferer we try for our own sakes to
suppress it as much as we can. We don’t always succeed,
·because· the opposition that we put up to sympathetic
sorrow and the reluctance with which we give in to it force
us to be more explicitly aware of it. In contrast, we never
have occasion to put up such opposition to our sympathy
with joy. Whenever there’s any envy in the case, we don’t
feel the slightest propensity towards joy; but if there’s no
envy we give way to joy without any reluctance. When we
are envious we are always ashamed of being so, which is
why we often say that we sympathize with someone’s joy
(and perhaps even wish we could do so) when we are really
disqualified from doing so by that disagreeable sentiment,
envy. We are glad about our neighbour’s good fortune, we
say, when in our hearts we may be really sorry. We often
feel sympathy with sorrow when we would prefer not to; and
we often don’t sympathize with joy when we would be glad
to do so. Given all these facts, it is natural to be led to the
conclusion that our propensity to sympathize with sorrow
must be very strong, and our inclination to sympathize with
joy very weak.
Despite this snap judgment, however, I venture to say that
when no envy is involved our propensity to sympathize with
joy is much stronger than our propensity to sympathize with
sorrow; and that our fellow-feeling for the agreeable emotion
Our sympathy with sorrow has been more taken notice of
than our sympathy with joy, though it’s no more real than
that. The word ‘sympathy’, in its most strict and basic
meaning, denotes our fellow-feeling with the sufferings of
others, not with their enjoyments. . . .
Our sympathy with sorrow is in some sense more universal than our sympathy with joy. Even when sorrow is
excessive, we may still have some fellow-feeling with it. What
we feel then doesn’t amount to the complete sympathy, the
perfect harmony and matching of sentiments, that constitutes approval. We don’t weep and exclaim and lament with
the sufferer. We’re conscious of his weakness and of the
extravagance of his passion, and yet we often have a definite
feeling of concern on his account. But if we don’t entirely
enter into and go along with a person’s joy, we have no
sort of regard or fellow-feeling for it. We have contempt
and indignation for the man who dances about with an
intemperate and senseless joy that we can’t accompany him
in.
It’s also relevant that pain, whether of mind or body, is a
more forceful [Smith: ‘pungent’] sensation than pleasure; and
our sympathy with pain, though it falls well short of what
is naturally felt by the sufferer, is usually a more lively and
distinct perception than our sympathy with pleasure, despite
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comes much closer to the liveliness of what is naturally felt
by rejoicing person than our fellow-feeling for someone’s
sorrow comes to his own sorrow.
We somewhat indulge excessive grief that we can’t entirely
go along with. We know what an enormous effort it takes for
the sufferer to bring his emotion down to a level of complete
harmony with what the spectator feels. So if he fails in
that, it’s easy for us to pardon him. But we have no such
indulgence for intemperate joy, because we have no sense
that any such vast effort is needed to bring that down to what
we ·spectators· can entirely enter into. The man who can
command his sorrow under the greatest calamities seems
worthy of the highest admiration; but someone who can
master his joy in the fullness of prosperity seems hardly to
deserve any praise. The gap between •what is naturally felt
by the person principally concerned and •what the spectator
can entirely go along with is much wider with sorrow than
with joy; and we’re aware of that.
If a man has good health, is out of debt, and has a
clear conscience, what can he added to his happiness? All
increases of fortune for such a man can properly be said to
be superfluous, and if he is much elated by them that must
be an effect of the most frivolous levity. Yet •this situation
may well be called the natural and ordinary state of mankind.
Despite the present misery and depravity of the world, so
rightly lamented, •this really is the state of the majority of
men. So we get the result: most men can’t find any great
difficulty in raising themselves ·sympathetically· to the level
of joy that someone else has through having come into this
happy state.
But though little can be added to this state (·of good
health, freedom from debt, and possession of a clear conscience·), much can be taken from it. There’s only a trivial
gap between this condition and the highest pitch of human
1: The Propriety of Action
prosperity, but between it and the lowest depth of misery
the distance is immense. Thus, adversity depresses the
sufferer’s mind much further below its natural state than
prosperity can raise it above that state. So the spectator
must •find it much harder to sympathize entirely with his
sorrow, keeping perfect time with it, than to enter thoroughly
into his joy, and must •depart much further from his own
natural and ordinary state of mind in the one case than in
the other. That’s why our sympathy with sorrow, despite
being a more forceful sensation than our sympathy with joy,
always falls further short than the latter does of the intensity
of what is naturally felt by the person principally concerned.
Sympathy with joy is a pleasure, and as long as envy
doesn’t oppose it our heart is glad to abandon itself to the
highest transports of that delightful sentiment. But it is
painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into that
with reluctance. When we are watching a dramatic tragedy,
we struggle as long as we can against the sympathetic sorrow
that the entertainment inspires, and eventually give way to
it only when we can no longer avoid it. And even then we try
to cover our concern from those we are with; if we shed any
tears we carefully conceal them, for fear that the others, not
entering into this excessive tenderness themselves, might
regard it as effeminacy and weakness. . . .
Why should we be more ashamed to weep than to laugh
when we are in company? We may often have as much reason
to weep as to laugh, but we always feel that the spectators
are more likely to go along with us in the agreeable emotion
than in the painful one. . . .
How hearty are the acclamations of the mob, who are
never envious of their superiors, at a triumphal parade!
And how sedate and moderate, usually, is their grief at an
execution! Our sorrow at a funeral generally amounts to
nothing but a pretended gravity, but our happiness at a
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christening or a marriage is always from the heart, with no
pretence. On all such joyous occasions our satisfaction is
often as lively as that of the persons principally concerned,
though perhaps not as durable. [Smith adds details about
our physical appearance during such bouts of sympathetic
pleasure.]
Whereas when we condole with our friends in their afflictions, how little we feel in comparison with what they feel!
[Smith adds details, including the remark that our relative
lack of real sympathy may produce guilt, which makes us]
work ourselves up into an artificial sympathy;. . . .but as soon
as we have left the room this vanishes and is gone for ever.
It seems that when Nature loaded us with our own sorrows,
she thought that they were enough, and therefore didn’t
command us to take any share other people’s sorrows except
for what is necessary to prompt us to help them.
[There follow two long rapturous paragraphs in praise of
‘magnanimity amidst great distress’, with poetic praise for
the serene suicides of Cato and Socrates. Then:]
In contrast with this, anyone who is sunk in sorrow and
dejection because of some calamity that has befallen him
always appears somewhat mean and despicable. We can’t
bring ourselves to feel for him what he feels for himself,
even though we might feel it for ourselves if we were in his
situation. So perhaps it is unjust of us to despise him, if any
sentiment can regarded as unjust when nature compels us to
have it. There’s never anything agreeable about the weakness
of sorrow, except when it arises from what we feel for others
more than from what we feel for ourselves. A son whose
kindly and respectworthy father has died may give way to
sorrow without much blame. His sorrow is mainly based on
a sort of sympathy with his departed parent, and we readily
enter into this humane emotion. But if he were to indulge
the same weakness on account of a misfortune that affected
1: The Propriety of Action
only himself, we would no longer be patient with him. If he
were reduced to beggary and ruin, if he were exposed to the
most dreadful dangers, indeed if he were led out to a public
execution and there shed one single tear on the scaffold,
he would disgrace himself for ever in the minds of all the
gallant and generous part of mankind. [Re ‘generous’, see note
on page 11.] Their compassion for him would be strong and
sincere; but because it would still fall short of his excessive
weakness they would not pardon his thus exposing himself
in the eyes of the world. His behaviour would affect them
with shame rather than with sorrow; and the dishonour that
he had thus [i.e. by weeping on the scaffold] brought on himself
would appear to them the most lamentable circumstance in
his misfortune. . . .
Chapter 2: The origin of ambition, and differences
of rank
It is because mankind are disposed to sympathize more
entirely with our joy than with our sorrow that we parade
our riches and conceal our poverty. Nothing is so humiliating
as having to expose our distress to the public view, and to
feel that although our situation is there for everyone to see,
no-one feels for us a half of what we feel. Indeed, this concern
for the sentiments of everyone else is the main reason why
we pursue riches and avoid poverty. Consider: what is the
purpose of all the toil and bustle of this world? What is the
purpose of avarice and ambition, of the pursuit of wealth,
power, and pre-eminence? Is it to supply the necessities
of nature? The wages of the poorest labourer can supply
them: his means afford him food and clothing, and the
comfort of a house and of a family. If we strictly examined
his personal budget we would find that he spends a great
part of his income on conveniences that can be regarded as
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Adam Smith
luxuries. . . . Why, then, are we so concerned to avoid being
in his situation, and why should those who have grown up
in the higher ranks of life regard it as worse than death to be
reduced to live—even without his labour—on the same simple
food as he eats, to dwell under the same lowly roof, and to be
dressed in the same humble clothes? Do they imagine that
their stomach is better or their sleep sounder in a palace
than in a cottage? The contrary of this has often been pointed
out, and anyway it is so obvious that everyone would know
it even if no-one had pointed it out! Well, then, what is the
source of that emulation—·that trying-to-copy·—that runs
through all the different ranks of men? What advantages
do we expect from that great purpose of human life that
we call ‘bettering our condition’? The only advantages we
can aim to derive from it are being noticed, attended to,
regarded with sympathy, acceptance, and approval. It is
the vanity—not the ease or the pleasure—that draws us.
But vanity is always based on our thinking we are the
object of attention and approval. The rich man glories in
his riches because he feels that •they naturally attract the
world’s attention to him, and that •mankind are disposed
to go along with him in all the agreeable emotions that the
advantages of his situation so readily inspire in him. At
the thought of this his heart seems to swell within him,
and he is fonder of his wealth on this account than for all
the other advantages it brings him. The poor man, on the
other hand, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that either
•it places him out of everyone’s sight or •if people do take
any notice of him it’s with almost no fellow-feeling for the
misery and distress that he suffers. He is humiliated on both
accounts. Being disapproved of is entirely different from
being overlooked, ·but being overlooked is essentially tied
to not being approved of·: the obscurity of the overlooked
poor man also shuts out the daylight of honour and approval;
1: The Propriety of Action
so that his feeling of not being taken notice of necessarily
damps the most agreeable hope and disappoints the most
ardent desire of human nature, ·namely, the desire for the
approval of one’s fellow-men·. The poor man comes and goes
unheeded, and is no more noticed in the middle of a crowd
than he is when shut up in his own hovel. The humble cares
and earnest work that occupy people in his situation don’t
entertain the dissipated and the cheerful. They avert their
eyes from him, or if his distress is so extreme that they have
to look at him, it’s only to keep themselves at a distance from
such a disagreeable object. Those who are fortunate and
proud are amazed that human wretchedness should dare to
present itself before them, having the insolence to disturb
the serenity of their happiness with the loathsome view of
its misery. The man of rank and distinction, on the other
hand, is observed by all the world. Everyone is eager to look
at him, and to have, if only through sympathy, the joy and
exultation that his circumstances naturally inspire in him.
The public care about what he does—about his every word,
every gesture. In a large assembly he is the person everyone
looks at, waiting for him to start and direct their passions;
and if his behaviour isn’t altogether absurd, every moment
gives him an opportunity to interest mankind, and to make
himself an object of the observation and fellow-feeling of
everyone around him. This •attention imposes restraints on
him—greatness always brings a certain loss of liberty—and
yet •it makes greatness an object of envy, and everyone
thinks that it compensates for all the toil and anxiety involved
in the pursuit of it, and (even more significant) all the leisure,
ease, and carefree security that are lost for ever by the
acquisition of greatness.
When we consider the condition of the great in the
delusive colours in which the imagination is apt to paint
it, it seems to be almost the abstract idea of a perfect and
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Adam Smith
happy state. It is exactly the state that we in our daydreams
had sketched out to ourselves as the ultimate object of all
our desires. That gives us a special sympathy with the
satisfaction of those who are in that state. We favour all
their inclinations, and support all their wishes. What a pity
it would be (we think) if anything were to spoil and corrupt
such an agreeable situation! We could even wish them to
be immortal; and it seems hard to us that death should at
last put an end to such perfect enjoyment. . . . Great King,
live for ever! is the Asian compliment that we would readily
offer them if experience didn’t teach us its absurdity. [In
1: The Propriety of Action
Mankind’s disposition to go along with all the passions
of the rich and the powerful is the basis for the ordering of
society into different ranks. Our fawning deference to our
superiors comes from our admiration for the advantages of
their situation more often than it comes from any individual’s
expecting benefit from their good-will. Their benefits can
extend to only a few, but their fortunes are a matter of
concern to almost everyone. We’re eager to help them to
complete a system of happiness that comes so near to
perfection; and we want to serve them for their own sake,
without any reward but the honour of obliging them. Nor is
our deference to the wishes of people of high rank primarily
based on a concern for the usefulness of •such submission,
a concern for the social order that is best supported by •it.
Even when the order of society seems to require that we
should oppose the high-ranking people, we can hardly bring
ourselves to do it. Consider the doctrine that
kings are the servants of the people, who are to be
obeyed, resisted, deposed, or punished as the public
convenience may require;
—that is the doctrine of reason and philosophy, but it isn’t the
doctrine of Nature! Nature would teach us to submit to kings
for their own sake, to tremble and bow down before their
high station, to regard their smile as a sufficient reward for
any services, and to dread their displeasure—even if no other
evil were to follow from it—as the severest of all humiliations.
To treat them in any way as men, to reason and argue with
them on ordinary occasions, requires a strength of character
that few men have. . . . The strongest motives—the most
furious •passions of fear, hatred, and resentment—are hardly
enough to outweigh this natural disposition to respect them.
For the bulk of the people to be willing to oppose a king
with violence, or to want to see him punished or deposed,
he’ll have to have aroused in them—innocently or not—the
the original, as well as in this version, the preceding sentence has the
Every calamity that befalls
them, every injury that is done them, arouses in the breast
of the spectator ten times more compassion and resentment
than he would have felt if the same things had happened
to other men. The only proper subjects for tragedy are
the misfortunes of kings. In this respect they resemble the
misfortunes of lovers. Those two situations are the ones
that chiefly interest us in the theatre; because, in spite of
everything that reason and experience can tell us to the
contrary, the prejudices of the imagination attach to these
two states a happiness superior to any other. To disturb or
to put an end to such perfect enjoyment seems to be the
most atrocious of all injuries. . . . All the innocent blood that
was shed in the civil wars provoked less indignation than
the death of Charles I. A stranger to human nature who
saw •men’s indifference to the misery of their inferiors and
•the regret and indignation they feel for the misfortunes of
those above them might well think that pain must be more
agonizing, and the convulsions of death more terrible, for
persons of higher rank than for those lower down in the
scale.
first occurrence of ‘king’ in this work.]
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Adam Smith
highest degree of all •those passions. Even when the people
have been brought this far, they are still apt to relent at any
moment; they easily relapse into their habitual deference
towards someone they have been accustomed to look on as
their natural superior. They can’t bear seeing their monarch
humiliated. Resentment gives way to compassion; they forget
all past provocations, their old drives towards loyalty start
up again, and they run to re-establish the ruined authority
of their old masters with the same violence with which they
had opposed it. The death ·by beheading· of Charles I ( ·after
the civil war of the 1640s·) brought about the restoration
of the royal family. Compassion for James II when he was
seized by the populace in making his escape on ship-board
nearly prevented the revolution ·of 1688·, and did slow it
down.
1: The Propriety of Action
graceful sense of his own superiority—something that those
who are born lower down the social scale can hardly ever
achieve. These are the arts [here = ‘the devices’ or even ‘the tricks’]
by which he proposes to make mankind more easily submit
to his authority and govern their inclinations according to
his wishes; and in this he usually succeeds. . . . During most
of his reign Louis XIV ·of France· was widely regarded as the
most perfect model of a great prince. What were the talents
and virtues by which he acquired this great reputation?
The scrupulous and inflexible rightness—the danger and
difficulty—the tireless energy—of everything he did? His
broad knowledge, his exquisite judgment, his heroic valour?
It was none of these. What he did have was the status of the
most powerful prince in Europe, which gave him the highest
rank among kings; and then, says his historian. . . [and
Smith gives a long quotation about Louis XIV’s grand and
imposing personal manner, his fine voice, his handsomeness,
and so on. Then:] These trivial accomplishments—supported
by his rank and no doubt by a degree of other talents and
virtues, though not an outstanding degree—established this
prince in the esteem of his own age and later generations’
respect for his memory. Compared with this kingly manner,
no other virtue appeared to have any merit. . . .
Do the great seem unaware of how easily they can get
the admiration of the public? or do they seem to think
that, for them as for anyone else, their rank must have
been purchased either by sweat or by blood? If the young
nobleman is instructed in how to support the dignity of
his rank, and to make himself worthy of the superiority
over his fellow-citizens that he has acquired through the
virtue of his ancestors, what accomplishments is he told to
acquire for this purpose? Is he to make himself worthy of
his rank by knowledge, hard work, patience, self-denial, or
any other kind of virtue? Because his least move is noticed,
he acquires a habit of care over every detail of ordinary
behaviour, and tries to perform all those small duties with
the most exact propriety. Being conscious of how much he
is observed, and of how much people are disposed to allow
him to have whatever he wants, he acts—even in utterly
ordinary situations—with the freedom and loftiness that are
naturally inspired by the thought of how the populace view
him. Everything about his conduct marks an elegant and
But a man of lower rank can’t hope to distinguish himself
in any such way as that. Polish [Smith’s word is ‘politeness’] is so
much a virtue of the great that it won’t bring much honour to
anyone else. The fool who imitates their manner, pretending
to be eminent by the extreme properness of his ordinary
behaviour, is rewarded with a double share of contempt for
his •folly and •presumption. [Smith goes on a bit about the
absurdity of pretentious behaviour in ordinary low-ranked
people. Then:] The behaviour of a private man ought to be
marked by perfect modesty and plainness, along with as
much casualness as is consistent with the respect due to
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the people he is with. If he hopes ever to distinguish himself,
it will have to be by more important virtues. He’ll have to
acquire dependents to match the dependents of the great;
and because his only access to funds from which to support
them will be through the labour of his body and the activity
of his mind, he’ll have to cultivate these. So he’ll need to
acquire superior knowledge in his profession, and to work
unusually hard in the exercise of it. He must be patient
in labour, resolute in danger, and firm in distress. He’ll
have bring these talents into public view by the difficulty
and importance of his undertakings, by the good judgment
and the severe and unrelenting application with which he
pursues them. His behaviour in all ordinary circumstances
must be marked by honesty and prudence, generosity and
frankness; and he must give priority to activities in which it
requires the greatest talents and virtues to act properly, but
in which the greatest applause goes to those who can acquit
themselves with honour. ·Consider these two portraits·:
1: The Propriety of Action
himself in any activity that might turn out to be
difficult or distressing. To cut a fine figure at a ball
is his great triumph, and to succeed in a romantic
intrigue is his highest exploit. He hates all public
confusions, not •because he loves mankind (the great
never look on their inferiors as fellow-men) and not
•because he lacks courage (for he usually doesn’t),
but •because he is aware that he doesn’t have any of
the virtues that are required in such situations, and
that the public attention will certainly be drawn away
from him towards by others. He may be willing to
expose himself to some small danger, or to conduct
a military campaign when that happens to be the
fashion. But he shudders with horror at the thought
of any situation that would demand the continual
and long exertion of patience, industry, strength, and
application of thought.
Those virtues are hardly ever to be found in men who are
born to high ranks. That is why in all governments—even
in monarchies—the highest administrative positions are
generally occupied, and the detailed administrative work
done, by men who were brought up in the middle and
lower social ranks, who have advanced through their own
hard work and abilities, although they are loaded with the
jealousy and opposed by the resentment of all those who
were born their superiors. The great—·those with the very
highest social rank·—at first regard these administrators as
negligible, then they come to envy them, and eventually they
are contented to knuckle under to them in the same abjectly
low manner that they want the rest of mankind to adopt
towards themselves.
It’s the loss of this easy command over the affections of
mankind that makes the fall from greatness so unbearable.
[Smith gives a rather full account of one example, the family
(1) When the man of spirit and ambition is depressed
by his situation, how impatiently he looks around
for some great opportunity to distinguish himself!
He won’t turn down anything that can provide him
with this. He even looks forward with satisfaction
to the prospect of foreign war, or civil war ·in his
own country·; with secret delight he sees—through
all the confusion and bloodshed that wars bring—the
probability of getting into some of those wished-for
occasions in which he can attract the attention and
admiration of mankind.
(2) The man of rank and distinction, •whose whole glory
consists in the propriety of his ordinary behaviour,
•who is contented with the humble renown that this
can bring him, and •who has no talents to acquire any
other ·distinction·, is unwilling to risk embarrassing
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Adam Smith
of the defeated king of Macedon who were led in triumph
through Rome. The crowd, he reports, were deeply moved by
the sight of the children, but were contemptuous of the king
because he had chosen to stay alive and endure this disgrace.
The disgrace, Smith says sharply, was to spend the rest of
his life in comfort and safety, on a generous pension. What
he had lost was ‘the admiring mob of fools, flatterers, and
dependents who had formerly been accustomed to attend to
everything he did’.]
‘Love’, says Rochefoucauld, ‘is often followed by ambition,
but ambition is hardly ever followed by love.’ Once the passion of ambition has taken possession of the breast, it won’t
allow any rival or any successor. To those who have been
accustomed to having or even hoping for public admiration,
all other pleasures sicken and die. Some fallen statesmen
have tried to become happier by working to overcome their
ambition, and to despise the honours that they could no
longer have; but how few have been able to succeed! Most of
them have spent their time in listless and insipid laziness,
•angry at the thought of their own insignificance, •unable to
take an interest in the occupations of private life, •enjoying
nothing but talk about their former greatness, •satisfied in
no activity except pointless attempts to recover that. Are
you sincerely determined never to barter your liberty for the
lordly servitude of a court, but to live free, fearless, and
independent? Here is one way to keep to that virtuous
resolution, and it may be the only one: Never enter the place
from which so few have been able to return, never come
within the circle of ambition, and never compare yourself
with those masters of the earth who have already occupied
the attention of half of mankind before you.
[Smith’s next paragraph starts with some rather obscure
remarks about people’s attitude to ‘place’, which he distinguishes from ‘rank’. He continues:] But no-one despises
1: The Propriety of Action
rank, distinction, pre-eminence, unless he is either vastly
•better than the human average or vastly •worse, i.e. unless
he is either
•so confirmed in wisdom and real philosophy that
he is convinced that as long as the propriety of his
conduct entitles him to approval it doesn’t matter
much whether people notice him or approve of him,
or else
•so habituated to the idea of his own low condition, so
sunk in slothful and sottish indifference, that he has
entirely forgotten the desire. . . .for superiority.
What gives to prosperity all its dazzling splendour is the
prospect of being a natural object of the joyous congratulations and sympathetic attention of mankind; and, correspondingly, what makes the gloom of adversity so horribly
dark is the feeling that our misfortunes are objects (not
of the fellow-feeling, but) of the contempt and aversion of
our brethren. It’s because of this that the most dreadful
calamities aren’t always the ones that it is hardest to bear.
It is often more humiliating to appear in public under small
disasters than under great misfortunes. The small ones
arouse no sympathy, whereas the great calamities evoke a
lively compassion. Although in the latter case the spectators’
sympathetic feelings aren’t as lively as the anguish of the
sufferer, the gap between sufferer and spectator is smaller
in those cases than in the case of small misfortunes, so that
the spectator’s imperfect fellow-feeling does give the sufferer
some help in bearing his misery. It would be more humiliating for a gentleman to appear at a social event covered
with filth and rags than to appear with blood and wounds.
The latter situation would draw people’s pity, whereas the
other would make them laugh. The judge who orders a
criminal to be set in the pillory dishonours him more than if
he had condemned him to the scaffold. [Smith adds some
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
1: The Propriety of Action
Chapter 3: The corruption of our moral sentiments
that comes from this disposition to admire the
rich and the great, and to despise or neglect the
downtrodden and poor
remarks about (dis)honour, apparently connecting it with the
(un)likelihood of attracting pity. Then:] That’s why persons
of high rank are never subjected to lesser punishments: the
law often takes their life, but it almost always respects their
honour. To flog such a person or to set him in the pillory,
on account of any crime whatever, is a brutality of which no
European government is capable—except Russia’s.
This disposition to admire—and almost to worship—the rich
and the powerful, and to despise or at least neglect persons
of poor and mean condition, is (on one hand) necessary to
establish and maintain the distinction of ranks and the order
of society, and (on the other) the great and most universal
cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. Moralists
all down the centuries have complained that wealth and
greatness are often given the respect and admiration that
only wisdom and virtue should receive, and that poverty and
weakness are quite wrongly treated with the contempt that
should be reserved for vice and folly.
A brave man isn’t made contemptible by being brought
to the scaffold; he is, by being set in the pillory. His
behaviour on the scaffold may gain him universal esteem
and admiration, whereas nothing he can do in the pillory
can make him agreeable. The sympathy of the spectators
supports him on the scaffold, saving him from the most
unbearable of all sentiments, namely the shameful sense
that his misery is felt by no-one but himself. There is no
sympathy for the man in the pillory; or if there is any it’s
not sympathy with •his pain, which is a trifle, but sympathy
with •his awareness of not getting any sympathy because of
his pain. Those who pity him blush and hang down their
heads for him. He droops in the same way, and feels himself
irrecoverably degraded by the punishment, though not by
the crime. In contrast with this, the man who dies with
resolution is naturally regarded with esteem and approval by
spectators who have their heads up, and he keeps his head
up too; and if the crime doesn’t deprive him of the respect
of others, the punishment never will. He has no suspicion
that his situation is an object of contempt or derision to
anyone, and he is entitled to assume the air not only of
perfect calmness but of triumph and exultation. . . .
We want to be respected and to be worthy of respect. We’re
afraid of being contemned and of being contemptible. But as
we move into the world we soon find that wisdom and virtue
are by no means the only objects of respect, and that vice
and folly aren’t the only objects of contempt. We often see the
world’s respectful attentions directed more strongly towards
the rich and great than towards the wise and virtuous. We
often see the vices and follies of the powerful much less
despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. For
us to further our great ambition to enjoy the respect and
admiration of mankind, two different roads are presented
to us, each leading to the desired goal: (1) the acquisition
of wealth and greatness, and (2) the study of wisdom and
the practice of virtue. Two different characters are presented
for us to try to achieve: (1) proud ambition and ostentatious
greed, and (2) humble modesty and fairness of conduct. Two
different pictures are held out to us as models on which we
can try to shape our own character and behaviour: (1) one
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is gaudy and glittering in its colouring, (2) the other is more
correct and more exquisitely beautiful in its outline; (1) one
forces itself on the notice of every wandering eye, (2) the
other doesn’t attract much attention from anyone but the
most studious and careful observer. (1) The admirers and
worshippers of wealth and greatness are the great mob of
mankind (and how odd it seems that most of them aren’t
in this camp because they hope to get anything out of it).
(2) The real and steady admirers of wisdom and virtue are
mostly wise and virtuous themselves; they’re a select group,
but not a large one, I’m afraid. The two •objects of respect
produce two •kinds of respect; it’s not hard to tell them apart,
and yet they have a great deal in common, so that inattentive
observers are apt to mistake the one for the other, i.e. to
observe a case of respect for wealth and greatness and to
mistake it for a case of respect for wisdom and virtue.
Almost everyone respects the rich and great more than
the poor and the humble. [Smith starts that sentence with ‘In equal
1: The Propriety of Action
less contempt and aversion than that of a man lower down
the social scale. One breach of the rules of temperance and
propriety by a poor man is commonly more resented than
the constant and open disregard of those rules ever is in a
rich man.
In the middling and lower stations of life, the road to
virtue is happily pretty much the same as the road to fortune,
in most cases; I’m talking here about the kind of fortune
that men in such ·lower· stations can reasonably expect
to acquire. In all the middling and lower professions, it’s
nearly always possible to succeed through real and solid
professional abilities combined with prudent, just, firm, and
temperate conduct. And sometimes abilities will bring success even when the conduct is far from correct. But habitual
imprudence will always cloud and sometimes submerge the
most splendid professional abilities, and so can injustice,
weakness, and extravagance. ·That’s one consideration that
tends to keep· men who are in the lower or middling stations
of life ·behaving properly. And there are two others: •Such
men· can never be great enough to be above the law, and
that inevitably overawes them into some sort of respect for
the rules of justice, or at least the more important of them.
•And the success of such people nearly always depends on
the favour and good opinion of their neighbours and equals,
and that can seldom be had unless their conduct is tolerably
regular [i.e. pretty much in accordance with the rules]. So the good
old proverb that honesty is the best policy holds true here;
and we can generally expect a considerable degree of virtue
in such situations, which are (fortunately for the good morals
of society!) the situations that the vast majority of mankind
are in.
In the upper stations of life the case is not, unfortunately,
always like that. In the courts of princes and in the drawingrooms of the great, success and advancement depend not
degrees of merit. . . ’, which suggests that his point might be: If a rich
man is morally on a par with a poor one, nearly everyone will give the
rich one more respect. But the rest of the paragraph doesn’t suggest any
With most
men the presumption and vanity of the rich are much more
admired than the real and solid merit of the poor. It is hardly
agreeable to good morals, indeed it seems like an abuse of
language, to say
‘Mere wealth and greatness, abstracted from merit
and virtue, deserve our respect.’
But we have to admit that wealth and greatness so constantly
get respect that they can be considered as in some ways the
natural objects of it. The status of someone who is wealthy
and great can be completely degraded by vice and folly, but
it takes an enormous intensity of vice and folly to do this.
The extravagance of a man of fashion is looked on with much
concern with moral equality across differences of rank.]
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on the esteem of intelligent and well-informed equals but on
the fanciful and foolish favour of ignorant, presumptuous,
and proud superiors; and flattery and falsehood too often
prevail over merit and abilities. In such societies the ability
to please is valued above the ability to serve. In times of
peace a prince or great man wishes only to be amused, and
is even apt to imagine •that he has almost no need for service
from anyone, or •that those who amuse him are sufficiently
able to serve him. The trivial accomplishments of. . . .a man
of fashion are commonly more admired than the solid and
masculine virtues of a warrior, a statesman, a philosopher,
or a legislator. All the great and awe-inspiring virtues—the
ones that can equip a man for the council, the senate, or
the battlefield—are regarded with the utmost contempt and
derision by the insolent and insignificant flatterers who
commonly loom largest in such corrupted societies. When
the duke of Sully was called on by Louis XIII to give his advice
in a great emergency, he noticed the courtiers giggling to
one another about his unfashionable appearance. ‘Whenever
your majesty’s father’, said the old warrior and statesman,
‘did me the honour to consult me, he ordered the buffoons
of the court to leave the room.’
It’s because of our disposition to admire and therefore to
imitate the rich and the great that they are able to set fashions—in dress, language, deportment. Even their vices and
follies are fashionable, and most men are proud to imitate
and resemble them in the very qualities that dishonour and
degrade them. [Some people, Smith says, act as though they
had •the vices and follies of the rich and great, wanting to
be admired for this, even when they don’t approve of •them
and perhaps don’t even have •them. ‘There are hypocrites
of wealth and greatness, as well as of religion and virtue.’
He is sharply critical of the not-very-rich man who tries to
pass himself off as rich without thinking about the fact that
if he really adopts the way of life of a rich man he will soon
1: The Propriety of Action
reduce himself ‘to beggary’. Then:]
To attain to this envied situation the candidates for
fortune too often abandon the path of virtue, which unfortunately sometimes goes in the exact opposite direction
from the path to wealth, status, fame. The ambitious man
comforts himself with the thought that in the splendid
situation that he is aiming at he’ll have so many ways to draw
the respect and admiration of mankind, and will be able to
act with such superior propriety and grace that the glow of
his future conduct will entirely cover or erase the foulness
of the steps by which he got there. In many governments
the candidates for the highest stations are above the law
[that clause is verbatim Smith]; and if they can attain the object
of their ambition they have no fear of being indicted for
anything they did to get there. So they often try to supplant
and destroy those who oppose or stand in the way of their
greatness—not only by fraud and falsehood (the ordinary
and vulgar arts of intrigue and plotting), but also sometimes
by committing the most enormous crimes, by murder and
assassination, by rebellion and civil war. They fail more
often than they succeed, and usually gain nothing but the
disgraceful punishment that their crimes deserve. And even
when they do attain that wished-for greatness, they find
nothing like the happiness that they had expected to enjoy
in it. What the ambitious man is really after is not ease or
pleasure but always some kind of honour (though often an
honour that he doesn’t understand well); and the honour of
his exalted station seems to him and to other people to be
polluted and defiled by the baseness of his way of achieving it.
[Smith continues with a colourful account of the ambitious
man who reaches the top by disgusting means, tries every
trick to get •others and •himself to forget how he got there,
and fails in •both attempts. ’He is still secretly pursued by
the avenging furies of shame and remorse.’]
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II: Merit and demerit
Part II: Merit and demerit: the objects of reward and
punishment
Section 1: The sense of merit and demerit
Introduction
Chapter 1: Whatever appears to be the proper
object of gratitude (resentment) appears to deserve
reward (punishment)
The actions and conduct of mankind can be brought within
range of approval/disapproval in two different ways: one is
through their being proper or improper, decent or graceless,
·right or wrong·; the other is through their having merit or
demerit, the qualities of deserving reward and of deserving
punishment.
[Smith’s first paragraph repeats, at greater length but with
no more content, the proposition that is the chapter-title.
Then:]
The sentiment that most immediately and directly
prompts us to reward ·someone· is gratitude, and what most
immediately and directly prompts us to punish ·someone· is
resentment. So it’s bound to be the case that any action that
appears to be a proper and approved object of gratitude will
seem to us to deserve reward, and any action that appears
to be a proper and approved object of resentment will seem
to us to deserve punishment.
Rewarding is recompensing or repaying, returning good
for good received. Punishing is also recompensing or repaying, though in a different manner; it is returning evil for evil
that has been done.
Gratitude and resentment are not the only passions that
interest us in the happiness or misery of other people; but
they are the ones that most directly arouse us to cause such
happiness or misery. If habitual approval of someone gives
us love and esteem for him, we are of course pleased that he
should have good fortune, and so we’re willing to lend a hand
to promote that. But our •love for him is fully satisfied if
his good fortune comes about without help from us. All this
passion wants is to see him happy, without regard for who is
I have already remarked that the sentiment or affection of
the heart [Smith’s phrase; see note on page 116 about ‘affection’] from
which an action comes, and on which its whole virtue or vice
depends, can be considered under two different aspects or
in two different relations:
(1) It can be considered in relation to the cause or object
that arouses it. The affection’s (un)suitableness or
(dis)proportion to the cause or object that arouses it
is what determines the (im)propriety, ·the rightness
or wrongness·, of the consequent action.
(2) It can be considered in relation to the end at which
it aims or the effect that it is likely to produce. The
affection’s tendency to produce beneficial or harmful
effects is what determines the merit or demerit, the
good or ill desert, of the action to which it gives rise.
In Part I of this work I have explained what our sense of (1)
the propriety or impropriety of actions consists in. I now
start to consider what (2) the good or ill desert of actions
consists in.
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the author of his prosperity. But •gratitude can’t be satisfied
in this way. If someone to whom we owe many obligations is
made happy without our assistance, though this pleases our
love it doesn’t satisfy our gratitude. Until we have repaid
him, till we ourselves have been contributed to promoting
his happiness, we feel ourselves still loaded with the debt
that his past services have laid upon us.
Similarly, if habitual disapproval of someone makes us
hate and dislike him, that will often lead us to take a malicious pleasure in his misfortune. But although •dislike and
hatred harden us against all sympathy, and sometimes even
dispose us to rejoice at the person’s distress, if no resentment
is involved—if neither we nor our friends have received
any great personal provocation—•these passions wouldn’t
naturally lead us to want to be instrumental in causing
such distress. Even if there was no risk of punishment for
having a hand in it, we would rather that his distress should
happen by some other means. To someone dominated by
violent hatred, it might be agreeable to hear that the person
he loathes and detests has been killed in an accident. But
if he has the least spark of justice (which he might have,
though violent hatred isn’t favourable to virtue), he would be
tremendously upset to have been the •unintentional cause
of the accident; and immeasurably more shocked by the
thought of having •voluntarily contributed to it. . . . But it’s
not like that with resentment. If someone who has done
us some great injury—murdered our father or our brother,
for example—dies of a fever soon afterwards, or is executed
for some other crime, this might soothe our hatred but it
wouldn’t fully gratify our resentment. What our resentment
makes us want is not merely for
•him to be punished,
but also for
•him to be punished by us,
II: Merit and demerit
and for
•him to be punished for the particular injury that he
did to us.
Resentment can’t be fully satisfied unless the offender is not
only made to grieve in his turn, but to grieve for the particular
wrong we have suffered from him. He must be made to
repent and be sorry for that particular action. And the natural
gratification of this passion tends automatically to produce
all the political ends of punishment—the correction of the
criminal, and the example to the public (who, through fear
of such punishment, will be scared off from being guilty
of a similar offence). So gratitude and resentment are the
sentiments that most immediately and directly prompt us to
reward and to punish; that is why anyone who seems to us
to be the proper and approved object of gratitude also seems
to us to deserve reward, and anyone who seems to us to be
the proper and approved object of resentment also seems to
us to deserve punishment..
Chapter 2: The proper objects of gratitude and
resentment
All it can mean to say that someone is ‘the proper and
approved object of gratitude (or resentment)’ is that he is
an object of gratitude (or resentment) that naturally seems
proper and is approved of. And what does it mean to say that
a given instance of gratitude or resentment ‘seems proper
and is approved of’? The same as it means to say this about
any other human passion, namely that the heart of every
impartial spectator entirely sympathizes with the passion in
question, i.e. that every unbiased bystander entirely enters
into the passion and goes along with it.
Therefore, a person appears to deserve reward if he is the
natural object of someone’s gratitude, this being an instance
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
of gratitude that every human heart is disposed to beat
time to [Smith’s phrase], and thereby applaud. And a person
appears to deserve punishment if he is the natural object of
someone’s resentment, this being an instance of resentment
that the breast of every reasonable man is ready to adopt
and sympathize with. It is surely right to say that an action
appears to deserve reward if everyone who knows of it will
want it to be rewarded, and appears to deserve punishment
if everyone who hears of it is angry about it and for that
reason is happy to see it punished. ·I shall now put flesh on
these two lots of bones·.
II: Merit and demerit
that leads us to applaud the good things that he is disposed
to do in return for the good that has been done for him.
As we entirely enter into the affection that produces these
return-benefits, they necessarily seem to be in every way
proper and suitable to their object.
(2) In the same way that we sympathize with the sorrow
of our fellow-creature when we see his distress, we enter into
his abhorrence and aversion towards whatever has caused
it. As our heart adopts •his grief and beats time to it, so
it is filled with the spirit by which he tries to drive away or
destroy the cause of •it. The slack and passive fellow-feeling
with which we accompany him in •his sufferings gives way
to the more vigorous and active sentiment with which we go
along with him in his effort either to repel •them or to gratify
his aversion to whatever it was that caused •them. This
is especially the case when the cause of his sufferings is a
human person. When we see one man oppressed or injured
by another, our sympathy with the distress of the sufferer
animates our fellow-feeling with his resentment against the
offender. We rejoice to see him hit back at his adversary, and
are eager and ready to help him whenever he exerts himself
•in self-defence or even (within limits) •in getting revenge.
If the sufferer dies in the quarrel, we sympathize not only
with the real resentment of his friends and relatives but
also with the resentment that we imagine to be felt by the
dead man, who in fact can no longer feel that or any other
human sentiment. . . . The sympathetic tears that we shed
for the immense and irretrievable loss that we imagine him
to have sustained seems like only a small part of the duty
we owe him. The injury he has suffered demands, we think,
a principal part of our attention. We feel the resentment
that we imagine he. . . .would feel if his cold and lifeless body
retained any awareness of what happens on earth. His blood,
we think, calls aloud for vengeance. . . . The horrors that
[The words ‘benefactor’ and ‘beneficiary’ will be used quite a lot in
this version, though Smith doesn’t use ‘benefactor’ so much and never
uses ‘beneficiary’. The aim is brevity—sparing us Smith’s ‘the person
who receives the benefit’ and ‘the person who bestows the benefit’.]
(1) Just as we sympathize with the joy of our companions
when they prosper, so also we join with them in their
contented and satisfied attitude to whatever is the cause
of their good fortune. We •enter into the love and affection
that they have for that cause, and •begin to love it too. We
would be sorry for their sakes if it were destroyed, or even
if it were placed too far away from them, out of the reach
of their care and protection, even if that distance wouldn’t
deprive them of anything except the pleasure of seeing it.
And this holds in a quite special way if the cause of our
brethren’s happiness is another person. When we see one
man being assisted, protected, and relieved by another, our
sympathy with the joy of the beneficiary serves to enliven our
fellow-feeling with his gratitude towards his benefactor. We
look on the benefactor in the way we imagine the beneficiary
must look on him; the benefactor seems to stand before
us in the most attractive and amiable light. So we find it
easy to sympathize with the beneficiary’s grateful affection
for the person to whom he has been so much obliged; and
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Adam Smith
are supposed to haunt the bed of the murderer, the ghosts
that (superstition imagines) rise from their graves to demand
vengeance on those who cut their lives short, all arise from
this natural sympathy with the imaginary resentment of the
murdered person. At least with this most dreadful of all
crimes, nature has in this way stamped on the human heart,
in the strongest and most indelible characters, an immediate
and instinctive approval of the sacred and necessary law of
retaliation, this being something that comes into play before
any thoughts about the utility of punishment.
II: Merit and demerit
less lavish in handing out favours. The good-natured but
unwise lavishness of James I of Great Britain doesn’t seem
to have brought him anyone’s personal loyalty; despite his
social and harmless disposition, he appears to have lived and
died without a friend. Whereas the whole gentry and nobility
of England risked their lives and fortunes in the cause of his
more frugal and discriminating son, ·Charles I·, despite the
coldness and distant severity of his ordinary behaviour.
(2) When one person suffers at the hands of another, and
the agent’s conduct appears to have been entirely directed
by motives and affections that we thoroughly enter into
and approve of, we can’t have any sort of sympathy with
the sufferer’s resentment, no matter how great the harm
that has been done to him. When two people quarrel, if we
sympathize with and entirely adopt the resentment of one of
them, we can’t possibly enter into the other’s. Our sympathy
with the person whose motives we go along with, and whom
we therefore look on as in the right, is bound to harden us
against all fellow-feeling with the other ·party to the quarrel·,
whom we necessarily regard as being in the wrong. Whatever
he has suffered, while it is no more than what we ourselves
would have wanted him to suffer, no more than what our
own sympathetic indignation would have prompted us to
inflict on him, it can’t either displease or provoke us. When
an inhuman murderer is brought to the scaffold, though
we have some compassion for his misery we can’t have any
sort of fellow-feeling with any resentment that he is absurd
enough to express any against his prosecutor or his judge.
The natural outcome of their just indignation is indeed most
fatal and ruinous to him; but we can’t be displeased with
the consequences of a sentiment that we feel that we cannot
avoid adopting when we bring the case home to ourselves.
Chapter 3: Where there’s no approval of the benefactor’s conduct, there’s not much sympathy with
the beneficiary’s gratitude; and where there’s no
disapproval of the motives of the person who does
someone harm, there’s absolutely no sympathy
with the victim’s resentment
[The first paragraph of this chapter repeats, without significant additions, what is said in the chapter’s heading. Then:]
(1) When we can’t sympathize with the affections of the
benefactor, when there seems to be no propriety in his
reasons for acting as he did, we’re less disposed to enter
into the gratitude of the beneficiary. A very small return
seems enough to reward the foolish and profuse generosity
that confers great benefits for trivial reasons—e.g. giving a
man an estate merely because he has the same personal
name and family name as the giver. . . . In a case like that,
our contempt for the folly of the benefactor hinders us from
thoroughly entering into the gratitude of the beneficiary; the
benefactor seems unworthy of it. . . . Monarchs who have
heaped wealth, power, and honours onto their favourites
haven’t often aroused the degree of attachment to their
persons that has often been experienced by those who were
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Chapter 4:
chapters
Recapitulation
Adam Smith
of
the
preceding
So it seems that the sense of demerit is like the sense
of merit in being a compounded sentiment, made up of two
distinct emotions; a direct antipathy to x’s sentiments and
an indirect sympathy with y’s resentment.
[Again Smith applies this to the varying emotional states
of a reader of history. This colourful account reaches a
climax here:] Our sense of the horror and dreadful atrocity
of such conduct, the delight we get from hearing that it was
properly punished, the indignation we feel when it escapes
this due retaliation, in short our whole sense and feeling of
what that conduct deserves—of the propriety and fitness of
inflicting evil on the person who is guilty of it and making
him grieve in his turn—arises from the sympathetic indignation that naturally boils up in the breast of the spectator
whenever he thoroughly brings home to himself the situation
of the sufferer.
[This short chapter is what its title says it is, and no more.]
Chapter 5:
demerit
II: Merit and demerit
Analysing the sense of merit and
(1) So it comes down to this: When one person x acts upon
another person y (if I may put it like that; ·I mean when x
acts in some way that has consequences affecting y·), our
sense of the propriety of x’s conduct arises from what I’ll
call a •direct sympathy with x’s affections and motives; and
our sense of the merit of x’s conduct arises from what I’ll
call an •indirect sympathy with y’s gratitude. [Strictly speaking,
there is nothing indirect about the latter sympathy; what is indirect is
that sympathy’s relationship to x.]
[The rest of this chapter was originally a long footnote.]
I have attributed our natural •sense of the ill desert of
On this account,. . . .the sense of merit seems to be a
compound sentiment, made up of two distinct emotions—a
direct sympathy with the sentiments of the benefactor and
an indirect sympathy with the gratitude of his beneficiaries.
[Smith now offers a fairly long paragraph applying this
account to our emotions as we read works of history. This
doesn’t add anything to the account, except for the remark
that ‘we are shocked beyond all measure if beneficiaries
seem by their conduct to have little sense of the obligations
conferred on them’.]
(2) In the same way that our sense of the impropriety of
the conduct of a person x arises from our lack of sympathy for
(or even an outright antipathy to) x’s affections and motives,
so also our sense of its demerit arises from what I’ll again
call an indirect sympathy with the person y who has suffered
from x’s conduct.
human actions to our sympathy with the resentment of the
sufferer; and many people—perhaps most—will see this as
a degradation of •that sentiment. Resentment is commonly
regarded as so odious they they’ll tend to think it impossible
that something as praiseworthy as the sense of the ill desert
of vice should be in any way based on it. They may be
more willing to admit that our sense of the merit of good
actions is based on our sympathy with the gratitude of the
beneficiaries, because gratitude—along with all the other
benevolent passions—is regarded as a likeable motive that
can’t detract from the value of whatever is based on it. ·But
that immediately puts them in a difficulty, because· gratitude
and resentment are obviously in every respect counterparts
to one another; if our sense of merit arises from a sympathy
with the one, our sense of demerit can hardly not come from
a fellow-feeling with the other.
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II: Merit and demerit
The writers ·in the Old Testament· wouldn’t have talked
so often or so strongly of God’s wrath and anger if they had
regarded every degree of those passions as vicious and evil,
even in so weak and imperfect a creature as man.
And here is another point. Resentment at the level at
which we too often see it is indeed just about the most odious
of all the passions, but it isn’t disapproved of when it doesn’t
fly so high and is brought right down to the level of the spectator’s sympathetic indignation. When we bystanders feel
that the sufferer’s resentment doesn’t in any way go beyond
our own, when no word or gesture escapes him that indicates
an emotion more violent than what we can keep time to, and
when he never aims at inflicting any punishment beyond
what we would rejoice to see inflicted. . . ., it is impossible
that we won’t entirely approve of his sentiments. Our own
emotion in this case is bound to strike us as clearly justifying
his. And as we learn from experience how incapable most
people are of this moderation, and how great an effort it
would take them to bring the rough undisciplined impulse of
resentment down to this suitable level, we can’t help having
a considerable degree of esteem and admiration for anyone
who manages to do so. When the sufferer’s animosity exceeds
(as it nearly always does) anything that we can go along with,
we can’t enter into it and so, inevitably, we disapprove of it.
[Smith says that our disapproval of excessive resentment is
greater than our disapproval of any other excess of passion,
amounts of excess being equal. Then:] That is why revenge,
the excess of resentment, appears to be the most detestable
of all the passions and is an object of everyone’s horror and
indignation. And because excessive instances of this passion
outnumber moderate ones a hundred to one, we’re much
inclined to regard it as odious and detestable right across
the board. (Depraved as we are, Nature hasn’t built into
us any drive or motive that is wholly evil in every way, i.e.
that can’t be properly praised and approved of whatever its
intensity level and direction of aim.) On some occasions we
have a sense that this usually-too-strong passion is too weak.
[Smith elaborates that along the lines of page 21 above.]
Please bear in mind that this inquiry is about a matter not
of •right but of •fact. We’re concerned here with principles ·or
criteria· to guide approval of the punishment of bad actions;
the topic isn’t the principles on the basis of which a perfect
being would arrive at such approvals but rather the ones
by which weak and imperfect men actually do arrive at
them. It’s obvious that the principles I have mentioned have
a great effect on a man’s sentiments; and it seems wisely
ordered that they should do so. The very existence of society
requires that undeserved and unprovoked malice should be
restrained by proper punishments, and thus that inflicting
those punishments should be regarded as a proper and
laudable action. And men are naturally endowed with a
desire for •the welfare and preservation of society; but the
Author of nature hasn’t left it to men to use their reason
to work out what kinds and levels of punishment are right
for •this purpose; rather, he has endowed men with an
immediate and instinctive approval of just precisely the kind
and level of punishment that is most proper to attain •it.
The arrangement that nature has made here is like what
it has done in many other contexts. With regard to all the
specially important purposes—the ones that we might call
nature’s favourites—she has endowed mankind not only with
an appetite for the end that she proposes, but also with an
appetite for the only means by which this end can be brought
about. (I mean: an appetite for them for their own sakes,
independently of any thought about what they might lead to.)
Thus self-preservation and the propagation of the species
seem to be the great ends that Nature has proposed in the
formation of all animals; and men are endowed with a desire
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Adam Smith
for those ends, and an aversion to the contrary. . . . But it
hasn’t been left to the slow and uncertain conclusions of our
reason to discover how to bring those ends about. Nature
has directed us to most of them by basic immediate instincts:
hunger,
thirst,
sexual passion,
the love of pleasure,
the fear of pain.
II: Merit and demerit
We seek all these for their own sakes, and not because they
are conducive to survival and the propagation of our species;
but they are conducive to them, and they are what the great
Director of nature intended as a means to them.
[The enormous footnote concludes with an extremely
difficult, confusing, and probably confused paragraph about
a certain ‘difference between the approval of propriety and
the approval of merit’.]
Section 2: Justice and beneficence
Chapter I: Comparing those two virtues
power to do so, and when his benefactor needs his help, is no
doubt guilty of black ingratitude. No impartial spectator will
have any fellow-feeling with the selfishness of his motives,
and he is the proper object of the highest disapproval. But
still he does no positive harm to anyone. [Smith presumably
means ‘he doesn’t positively do harm’.] He merely doesn’t do the
good that in propriety he ought to have done. He is an object
of •hatred, a passion naturally aroused by impropriety of
sentiment and behaviour. but not of •resentment, a passion
that is properly aroused only by actions that tend to do real
positive harm to some particular persons. So this person’s
lack of gratitude can’t be punished. To oblige him by force
to do what gratitude should lead him to do, and what every
impartial spectator would approve of him for doing, would
be even more improper than his neglecting to do it. His
benefactor would dishonour himself if he tried by violence to
force him into gratitude, and it would be mere meddling for
any third person to intervene unless he was the superior of
The only actions that seem to require reward are ones that
•tend to do good and •come from proper motives, because
they’re the only ones that are approved objects of gratitude,
i.e. that arouse the sympathetic gratitude of the spectator.
The only actions that seem to seem to deserve punishment are ones that •tend to do harm and •come from
improper motives, because they’re the only ones that are
approved objects of resentment, i.e. arouse the sympathetic
resentment of the spectator.
Beneficence is always free, it can’t be extorted by force,
and merely not giving doesn’t expose one to punishment,
because the mere lack of beneficence doesn’t tend to produce
real positive evil. It may disappoint someone who had reasonably expected some benefit, and on that account it may
justly arouse dislike and disapproval; but it can’t provoke
any resentment that mankind will go along with. The man
who doesn’t recompense his benefactor when he has it in his
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one of the other two [‘superior’ here means ‘employer or commanding
officer or. . . ’]. But of all the duties of beneficence, those that
are recommended by gratitude come closest to what is called
a perfect and complete obligation—·i.e. come closest to the
status of ‘You deserve to be punished if you don’t’·. What we
are prompted to do by friendship, by generosity, by charity,
meeting with universal approval when we do so, is even more
free than the duties of gratitude, even further from being
extortable by force. We have the phrase ‘a debt of gratitude’;
we do not speak of ‘a debt of charity’ or ‘. . . of generosity’ or
even ‘. . . of friendship’ except when the friendship relation
has bases for gratitude mixed in with it.
It seems that nature gave us resentment for our own
defence and only for that. It is the safeguard of justice and
the security of innocence. It prompts us to beat off harm
that others are trying to do to us, and to retaliate for harm
already done, so that •the offender may be caused to be sorry
for what he did, and so that •others, through fear of similar
punishment, may be frightened off from similar offences.
So resentment must be reserved for these purposes; the
spectator will never go along with it when it is exerted for any
other purpose. And the mere lack of the beneficent virtues
doesn’t (and doesn’t try to) do any harm from which we can
have occasion to defend ourselves.
But there’s another virtue the observance of •which is not
left to the freedom of our own wills, •which may be extorted
by force, and •the violation of which exposes the agent to
resentment and thus to punishment. This virtue is justice;
the violation of justice is injury; it does real positive harm
to some particular persons, from motives that are naturally
disapproved of. So it is a proper object of resentment, and of
the natural consequence of resentment, namely punishment.
Mankind go along with and approve of the violence employed
to avenge the harm that is done by injustice, and to an
II: Merit and demerit
even greater extent they go along with and approve of the
violence that is used •to prevent and beat off the injury
and •to restrain the offender from harming his neighbours.
Someone who is thinking of committing an injustice is aware
of this, and feels that force may properly be used, both
by his intended victim and by others, either to stop him
from committing his crime or to punish him when he has
committed it. This is the basis for the remarkable distinction
between •justice and •all the other social virtues that was
recently emphasized by an author of great and original
genius, namely:
We feel ourselves to be under a stricter obligation to
act according to •justice than to act in ways that fit
with •friendship, •charity, or •generosity. Whether
we perform these last three virtues seems to be left
somewhat to our own choice; but we feel somehow
that we are in a special way tied, bound, and obliged
to conform to justice ·in our conduct·. We feel that
force may, with the utmost propriety and with the
approval of all mankind, be used to make us conform
to justice, but not to follow the precepts of the other
social virtues.
But we must always carefully distinguish •what is only
blamable or a proper object of disapproval from •what
may be either punished or prevented by force. Something
seems blamable if it falls short of the ordinary degree of
proper beneficence that experience teaches us to expect of
everybody; and something seems praiseworthy if it goes
beyond that degree of beneficence. Conduct that is at the
ordinary degree of beneficence seems neither blameworthy
nor praiseworthy. Someone who behaves towards his son,
his father, his brother, in a manner that is neither better
nor worse than the conduct of most men, seems properly to
deserve neither praise nor blame. . . .
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But even the most ordinary degree of kindness or beneficence can’t, among equals, be extorted by force. Among
equals each individual is—•naturally, and •independently
of the institution of civil government—regarded as having a
right to defend himself from injuries and to exact a certain
degree of punishment for injuries that have been done to him.
Every generous spectator not only •approves of his conduct
when he does this, but •enters so far into his sentiments
that he is often willing to help him in this. . . . But when
•a father falls short of the ordinary degree of parental
affection towards a son, or
•a son’s attitude to his father seems to lack the filial
reverence that might be expected, or
•brothers are without the usual degree of brotherly
affection, or
•a man shuts out compassion and refuses to relieve
the misery of his fellow-creatures though he could
easily do so
—in all these cases, though everyone blames the conduct,
no-one imagines that those who might have reason to expect
more kindness have any right to extort it by force. The
sufferer can only complain, and the spectator can’t interfere
except advising and persuading. In all such cases it would
be thought the highest degree of insolence and presumption
for equals to use force against one another.
A superior may sometimes require people under his
jurisdiction to behave, in this respect, with a certain degree of
propriety towards one another; and no-one will find fault with
his doing this. The laws of all civilized nations •oblige parents
to support their children, and ·adult· children to support
their ·aged· parents, and •impose on men many other duties
of beneficence. [The phrase ‘the civil magistrate’, which we are about
II: Merit and demerit
who makes the civil laws.] The civil magistrate is entrusted
with the power not only of •preserving the public peace by
restraining injustice, but also of •promoting the prosperity
of the commonwealth by establishing good discipline and
discouraging every sort of vice and impropriety. So it is
all right for him to prescribe rules that don’t just prohibit
citizens from harming one another but also command that
they help one another to a certain degree. If the sovereign
commands the citizens to do A, from then on not-doing-A is
disobedience and is not only blameworthy but punishable.
That holds even if before the sovereign’s command there had
been no blame attached to not-doing-A, and it holds more
strongly still if not-doing-A had been highly blameworthy
even before the sovereign commanded the doing of A. Of
all the duties of a law-giver, however, this may be the one
that needs the greatest delicacy and caution to perform with
propriety and judgment. To neglect it altogether exposes
the commonwealth to many gross disorders and shocking
crimes, and to push it too far is destructive of all liberty,
security, and justice.
Though the lack of beneficence doesn’t seem to deserve
punishment among equals, the greater efforts of that virtue
do appear to deserve the highest reward. By producing the
greatest good they become natural and approved objects of
the liveliest gratitude. On the other hand, a man’s •breach of
justice exposes him to punishment, whereas his •observing
the rules of that virtue hardly seem to deserve any reward.
There is certainly a propriety in behaving justly, so that such
conduct deserves all the approval that is due to propriety.
But because it does no real positive good it isn’t entitled to
much gratitude. If the best we can say of someone is that he
doesn’t violate the persons or estates or reputations of his
neighbours, he surely doesn’t have much positive merit. But
he does fulfill all the rules of justice, strictly so-called, and
to meet, referred to any official whose job is to apply and enforce the
laws; but Smith and some other writers extended it to cover also anyone
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does everything that his equals can properly •force him to
do or •punish him for not doing. We can often fulfill all the
rules of justice by sitting still and doing nothing!
As you treat others, so they will treat you; and retaliation
seems to be the great law that Nature dictates to us. We
think of beneficence and generosity as being owed to those
who are themselves generous and beneficent. As for those
who never open up their hearts to the feelings of humanity,
we think that they should be correspondingly •shut out from
the affections of all their fellow-creatures and •allowed to
live in the midst of society as though in a great desert where
there’s nobody to care for them. . . . Someone who violates
the laws of justice ought to be made to feel for himself the
evil that he has done to someone else; and because he can’t
be •restrained by his brethren’s sufferings, he ought to be
•over-awed by the fear of his own! The man who is merely
innocent—observing the laws of justice with regard to others,
abstaining from harming his neighbours, but doing no more
than that—can deserve only that his neighbours should
respect his innocence in return, and that the same laws
should be scrupulously observed with regard to him.
II: Merit and demerit
with. There’s no doubt that nature gives to each man the
primary responsibility for his own care; and it’s fit and right
that this should be so, because each man is better able to
take care of himself than anyone else is. It follows from
this that each man is much more deeply concerned •with
whatever is immediately connected with himself than •with
what has to do with anyone else. Hearing about the death
of someone with whom we have no particular connection
will probably give us less concern—will do less in the way of
putting us off our food or disturbing our sleep—than would
a very insignificant disaster that has befallen ourselves. But
although the ruin of our neighbour may affect us much
less than a small misfortune of our own, we mustn’t ruin
him in order to prevent that small misfortune—or even to
prevent our own ruin. In all cases like this we must see
ourselves not in the light in which we naturally appear to
•ourselves but rather in the light in which we naturally
appear to •others. . . . Though each man’s happiness may
matter to him more than the happiness of the rest of the
world, to every other person it doesn’t matter any more
than anyone else’s. So although it may be true that every
individual, in his own breast, naturally prefers himself to
all mankind, he won’t dare to look mankind in the face and
declare that he acts according to this principle. He feels that
they can never go along with him in this preference, and
that however natural it may be to him it must always appear
excessive and extravagant to them. When he views himself
in the light in which he’s aware that others will view him, he
sees that to them he’s merely one of the multitude and in
no way better than any of the others. If he wants to act in
such a way that an impartial spectator can may enter into
the motives of his conduct—that being what he wants most
of all—he must now and always humble the arrogance of his
self-love, bringing it down to something that other men can
Chapter 2: The sense of justice, of remorse, and of
the consciousness of merit
The only proper motive for harming our neighbour—the only
incitement to do evil to someone else that mankind will go
along with—is just indignation for evil that the other person
has done to us. To disturb his happiness merely because it
stands in the way of our own, to take from him what is of
real use to him merely because it may be of equal or of more
use to us, or in this way to act on the natural preference that
every man has for his own happiness above that of other
people, is something that no impartial spectator can go along
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Adam Smith
II: Merit and demerit
guard his •property and possessions; and lastly those that
guard what are called his •personal rights, or what is due to
him from the promises of others.
go along with. They will accept his self-love far enough to
allow him to care about his own happiness more than anyone
else’s—to care about it more and to work more intently on its
behalf. When they place themselves in his situation, they’ll
readily go along with him to that extent. In the race for
wealth, honours, and promotions he may run as hard as he
can, straining every nerve and muscle in order to outstrip all
his competitors. But if he should jostle or trip any of them,
the allowance of the spectators is entirely at an end—that
is a violation of fair play that they can’t allow. . . . They now
sympathize with the natural resentment of the person who
was shouldered aside or tripped, and the offender becomes
an object of their hatred and indignation. He is aware of this,
and feels that those sentiments are ready to burst out from
all sides against him.
The greater and more irreparable the evil that is done,
the greater is
•the resentment of the sufferer,
•the sympathetic indignation of the spectator, and
•the sense of guilt in the agent.
Death is the greatest evil that one man can inflict on another, and it arouses the highest degree of resentment in
those who are immediately connected with the person who
has been killed. Thus, of all the crimes that affect only
individuals murder is the most atrocious—in the sight of
mankind, and in the sight of the murderer. Being •deprived
of something that we now possess is a greater evil than being
•disappointed in some expectation of receiving a certain good.
That is why theft and robbery (which take our possessions)
are greater crimes than breach of contract (which merely
disappoints our expectations). So the most sacred laws of
justice—the ones the violation of which seems to call loudest
for vengeance and punishment—are the laws that guard our
neighbour’s •life and person; next in line come those that
If someone who violates the more sacred laws of justice
ever thinks about the sentiments that mankind must have
regarding him, he has to feel all the agonies of shame, horror,
and consternation. When his passion—·i.e. the passion that
caused him to act so badly in the first place·—is gratified,
and he starts to think coolly about his past conduct, he
can’t enter into ·or sympathize with· any of the motives that
influenced it. They now appear as detestable to him as they
always did to other people. By sympathizing with the hatred
and abhorrence that other men must have towards him, he
now to some extent hates and abhors himself. The situation
of the person who has suffered from his injustice now draws
pity from him. He is grieved at the thought of it, and regrets
•the unhappy effects of his conduct, feeling that •they have
made him the proper object of mankind’s resentment and indignation of mankind, and of the vengeance and punishment
that naturally flow from such resentment. . . . His fellowcreatures’ memory of his crimes shuts out from their hearts
all fellow-feeling with him; the sentiments that they do have
regarding him are just what he is most afraid of. Everything
seems hostile; he would like to escape to some inhospitable
desert where he would never have to confront any human
creature, never have to read in mankind’s countenance the
condemnation of his crimes. But solitude is even more
dreadful than society. His own thoughts can present him
with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and disastrous,
the miserable expectation of incomprehensible misery and
ruin. The horror of solitude drives him back into society,
and he returns—bewildered, ashamed, and terrified—into
the presence of mankind, in order to beg for some little
protection from the those very judges who he knows have
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The Theory of Moral Sentiments
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already unanimously condemned him! Such is the nature of
the sentiment of remorse, properly so-called; it is the most
dreadful sentiment that human beings are capable of. It is
compounded out of •shame from the sense of the impropriety
of past conduct; •grief for the effects of it; •pity for those who
have suffered through it; and, because of the justly provoked
resentment of all rational creatures, •the dread and terror of
punishment.
The opposite behaviour naturally inspires the opposite
sentiment. Take the case of a man who has performed a
generous action, not as a frivolous whim but from proper
motives. When he looks forward to those whom he has
served, he feels himself to be the natural object of their love
and gratitude and, by sympathy with them, of the esteem
and approval of all mankind. And when he looks back to
•the motive from which he acted, viewing it in the light in
which the unbiased spectator will survey it, he still enters
into •it and, by sympathy with the approval of this supposed
impartial judge, he applauds himself. In both these points of
view, ·forward and backward·, his own conduct appears
to him every way agreeable. The thought of it fills his
mind with cheerfulness, serenity, and composure. He is in
friendship and harmony with all mankind, and looks on his
fellow-creatures with confidence and benevolent satisfaction,
knowing that he has made himself worthy of their most
favourable regards. The combination of all these sentiments
constitute the consciousness of merit, i.e. the consciousness
of deserving to be rewarded.
II: Merit and demerit
others, and is vulnerable to harm from them. When the
needed help is given and returned from love, gratitude,
friendship, and esteem, the society flourishes and is happy.
Its different members are all bound together by the agreeable
bands of love and affection. . . .
But even if the needed help is not given from such
generous and disinterested motives, even if the different
members of the society don’t have love and affection for one
another, the society won’t necessarily fall apart, though it will
be less happy and agreeable. Society can stay alive among
different men, as it can among different merchants, from
a sense of its utility, without any mutual love or affection.
Even if no-one has any obligations or debts of gratitude to
anyone else, society can still be held together by a trade
[Smith says ‘mercenary exchange’] in benefits, on the basis of
agreed valuation for each benefit.
What society can’t do is to survive among those who are
constantly ready to harm and injure one another. The moment that injury begins, the moment that mutual resentment
and hostility kick in, all society’s bands are snapped and its
different members are (so to speak) dissipated and scattered
around by the violence and opposition of their discordant
affections [see page 116 note on ‘affection’]. (If there is any society
among robbers and murderers, they must at least. . . .abstain
from robbing and murdering one another.) So beneficence
is less essential than justice is to the existence of society; a
lack of beneficence will make a society uncomfortable, but
the prevalence of injustice will utterly destroy it.
That is why Nature, while urging mankind to acts of
beneficence by the pleasing awareness of deserved reward,
hasn’t thought it necessary to guard and enforce beneficent
conduct by the terrors of deserved punishment in case it
should be neglected. Beneficence is an ornament that makes
the building more beautiful, not the foundation that holds
Chapter 3: The utility of this constitution of nature
That is how man, who can’t survive except in society, was
equipped by nature for the situation for which he was made.
Each member of the human society needs help from the
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it up; so it’s good that it should be •recommended, but it
doesn’t have to be •imposed. In contrast with that, justice
is the main pillar that holds up the entire building. If it is
removed, the whole of human society—
the great, the immense structure whose creation and
support seems to have been Nature’s special care, her
cherished project
—must in a moment crumble into atoms. In order to enforce
the maintenance of justice, therefore, Nature has implanted
in mankind the awareness of guilt, the terrors of deserved
punishment that come with its violation, as the great safeguards of human society, to protect the weak, curb the
violent, and punish the guilty. Although men are naturally
sympathetic,
•they feel so little for anyone with whom they have no
special connection, compared with what they feel for
themselves,
•the misery of someone who is merely their fellowcreature matters so little to them in comparison with
even a small convenience of their own, and
•they have it so much in their power to harm their
fellow-creature and may have so many temptations to
do so,
that if this fear-of-punishment mechanism didn’t go to work
within them in the fellow-creature’s defence, aweing them
into a respect for his innocence, they would like wild beasts
be ready at all times to attack him, and a man would enter
an assembly of men as he enters a den of lions.
All through the universe we see means delicately adjusted
to the ends they are intended to produce. In the mechanism
of a plant or animal body we admire how everything is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature—•the
support of the individual and •the propagation of the species.
But in everything like this we still distinguish the cause of the
II: Merit and demerit
various motions and structures from their purpose. [Smith
calls this distinguishing their ‘efficient cause’ from their ‘final cause’.]
The digestion of the food, the circulation of the blood,. . . .and
so on are all operations that are necessary for the great
purposes of animal life. But we don’t try to explain them
in terms of those purposes in the way one might explain
them in terms of their efficient causes. We don’t imagine
that the blood circulates or the food digests of its own accord,
intending to achieve the purposes of circulation or digestion.
The wheels of a watch are admirably adjusted to the purpose
for which it was made, telling the time. All their various
motions work together in the most precise way to produce
this effect. If they wanted and intended to tell the time,
they couldn’t do it better! But we attribute that desire and
intention not to the wheels but to the watch-maker, and
we know that what makes them move is a spring, which
doesn’t intend to produce its effect any more than they
do. ·This is standard stuff·: When we are explaining the
operations of bodies, we always in this way distinguish
the cause from the purpose [‘the efficient from the final cause’].
Yet when we are explaining the operations of minds, we
are apt to run these two different things together. When
natural forces lead us to pursue purposes that a refined
and enlightened reason would recommend to us, we’re apt
to think of that enlightened reason as though it were the
efficient cause of the sentiments and actions by which we
pursue our purpose. . . . On a superficial view, this cause
seems sufficient to produce the effects that we credit it with,
and the system of human nature seems to be simpler and
more agreeable when all its different operations are in this
way explained in terms of a single cause, ·namely reason ·.
As society •cannot survive unless the laws of justice are
mainly observed, and as social interactions •cannot take
place among men who don’t generally abstain from injuring
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one another; it has been thought that our awareness of this
•necessity is what led us to approve of the enforcement of
the laws of justice by the punishment of those who violated
them. Here in more detail is how this line of thought goes:
Man has a natural love for society, and wants the
union of mankind to be preserved for its own sake,
independently of whether he himself would get any
benefit from it. The orderly and flourishing state of
society is agreeable to him, and he loves the thought
of it. He dislikes social disorder and confusion, and is
upset by anything that tends to produce it. He does
also realize that his own welfare is connected with
the prosperity of society, and that its preservation is
needed for his happiness and perhaps for his survival.
So he has every reason to hate anything that can
tend to destroy society, and is willing to use every
possible means to hinder such a hated and dreadful
event. Injustice necessarily tends to destroy society.
So every appearance of injustice alarms him, and he
rushes to stop the progress of anything that would
quickly put an end to all that is dear to him if it were
allowed to continue unchecked. If he can’t restrain
it by gentle and fair means he must beat it down by
force and violence—he must somehow put a stop to
its further progress. That is why he often approves
of the enforcement of the laws of justice through the
punishment of those who violate them—even their
capital punishment, which removes the disturber of
the public peace from the world, and terrifies others
by the example it sets.
That’s what people commonly say about our approval of the
punishment of injustice. And there is truth in it: we often
have occasion to confirm our natural sense of the propriety
and fitness of punishment by thinking about how necessary
II: Merit and demerit
it is for preserving the order of society. When
•the guilty man is about to suffer the retaliation that
mankind’s natural indignation declares to be due to
his crimes, and
•the insolence of his injustice is broken and humbled
by his terror of the approaching punishment, and
•he is no longer someone to be feared, and for generous
and humane people begins to be someone to be pitied,
the thought of what he is about to suffer extinguishes
people’s resentment towards him—resentment arising from
the sufferings of his victims. They are disposed to pardon and
forgive him, and to save him from the punishment that they
had in their cool hours regarded as the proper retribution
for such crimes. So here they look for help to considerations
of the general interests of society. They counterbalance
the impulse of this weak and partial humaneness by the
dictates of a humanity that is more comprehensive. They
reflect that mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent, and
they counter the emotions of compassion that they feel for a
particular person by a broader compassion that they feel for
mankind.
Sometimes too we find it appropriate to use the ‘It’s
necessary for the support of society’ defence ·not merely
of punishment for injustice but also· of the propriety of
observing the general rules of justice in the first place.
We often hear the young and the restless ridiculing the
most sacred rules of morality, and proclaiming the most
abominable maxims of conduct—sometimes because they
have become morally rotten but more often because of the
emptiness of their hearts. Our indignation rises, and we are
eager to refute and expose such detestable principles. Now,
what initially inflames us against these principles is their
intrinsic detestableness. [Smith then presents in a rather
tangled form two lines of thought involving the claims that
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the principles in question
(a) are natural and proper objects of hatred and
detestation,
(b) are ones that we hate and detest,
(c) ought to be condemned.
Defending (c) purely on the basis of (b) wouldn’t appear to
be conclusive (Smith says we think). It might be better to
base (c) on (b) if that were based on (a). But the fact is
that when we are confronted by people who reject the basic
principles of justice, it’s not going to do any good to talk
about actual or legitimate hatred and detestation because,
Smith continues:] when we are asked ‘Why shouldn’t we do
A?’ the very question seems to show that doing A doesn’t
appear to the questioner to be ·in itself· a natural and proper
object of hatred. So we must show him that A ought to be
done for the sake of something else. And that is what starts
us looking around for other arguments, and then what we
come up with first is the disorder and confusion of society
that would result from everyone’s behaving unjustly. We
seldom fail, therefore, to insist on this topic.
But although it’s usually obvious that the welfare of
society is put at risk by •licentious practices, that thought is
seldom what first arouses us against •them. All men, even
the most stupid and unthinking ones, loathe fraud, perfidy,
and injustice, and are delighted to see them punished. But
although it is obvious that justice is necessary for the
existence of society, that’s something that few men have
ever thought about.
·I am contending that· what basically puts us in favour
of the punishment of crimes against individuals is not our
concern for the preservation of society. There are many
obvious reasons for this. (1) Our concern for the fortune
and happiness of •individuals doesn’t ordinarily arise from
our concern for the fortune and happiness of •society. This
II: Merit and demerit
thought—
‘I am concerned for the destruction of that man,
because he is a member or part of society,’
when said by someone who really cares about society as a
whole, is as silly as this—
‘I am concerned for the loss of a single guinea, because
it is a part of a thousand guineas’
when said by someone who really cares about a thousand
guineas. In neither case does our concern for the individuals
arise from our concern for the multitude; in each case our
concern for the multitude is composed out of the particular concerns that we feel for the different individuals that
make it up. When someone steals money from me, what
motivates my prosecution of him is not a concern for the
preservation of my whole fortune, but rather my concern for
the particular sum that was stolen; and, similarly, when one
man is harmed or destroyed, what motivates our demand
that the perpetrator be punished is not our concern for
the general interest of society, but rather our concern for
that one individual person who has been harmed. [Smith
goes on to distinguish this concern-for-the-individual from
the delicately detailed concern that we might have for an
individual friend, lover, mentor or the like. All we have here
is a concern for someone because he is our fellow-creature.
How we feel about him personally doesn’t come into it; or
anyway it shouldn’t, though Smith admits that it is likely to
do so, damping down our resentment of someone who has
unjustly harmed a nasty victim.]
Sometimes indeed we both punish and approve of punishment purely on the grounds of the general interests of society,
interests that we think can’t be secured without the punishment in question. All the punishments inflicted for breaches
of. . . .military discipline are examples of this. Such crimes
don’t immediately or directly harm any particular person;
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but it is thought that their remote consequences will or might
included great harm to society. A sentinel who falls asleep
on his watch suffers death by the laws of war, because such
carelessness might endanger the whole army. This severity
may often seem to be necessary, and therefore to be just and
proper. . . . Yet this punishment, however necessary it may
be, always appears to be excessively severe—a punishment
so great for a crime seemingly so small. . . . A humane person
must gather his thoughts, make an effort, and exert his
whole firmness and resolution before he can bring himself
either to inflict such a punishment or to go along with its
being inflicted by others. This is different from his view
of just punishment of an ungrateful murderer or parricide,
where his heart vigorously—even joyfully—applauds the just
retaliation that seems right for such detestable crimes. . . .
The very different sentiments with which the spectator views
those different punishments shows that his approvals in
the two cases are not based on the same principles. The
spectator looks on the sentinel as an unfortunate victim,
who indeed ought to be devoted to the safety of numbers,
II: Merit and demerit
but whom still in his heart he would be glad to save; and
he is only sorry that the interest of the many should oppose
his being let off. But if the murderer escaped punishment,
this would arouse the spectator’s highest indignation, and
he would call on God to avenge in another world the crime
that mankind had wrongly neglected to punish on earth.
·A propos of that last point·: Notice that we’re so far from
imagining that injustice ought to be punished in this life
merely in the interests of social order that can’t otherwise be
maintained, that •Nature teaches us to hope, and •religion
(we suppose) authorises us to expect, that it will be punished
even in a life to come. One might say that our sense of its ill
desert pursues it beyond the grave, though the example
of its punishment there can’t serve to deter the rest of
mankind—who don’t see it, and don’t know it—from being
guilty of similar conduct here. But we think that the God’s
justice requires that he should hereafter avenge the injuries
of the widow and the fatherless, who are so often harmed
with impunity in this life. . . .
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II: Merit and demerit
Section 3: The influence of luck on mankind’s sentiments regarding the
merit or demerit of actions
Whatever praise or blame can be due to any action must
be based on
(1) the intention or affection of the heart from which
the action comes,
(2) the external action or movement of the body which
this affection causes, or
(3) the good or bad consequences that actually come
from it.
These three constitute the whole nature and circumstances
of the action, and must be the basis for any quality that
belongs to it.
It is abundantly evident that (2) and (3) can’t be a basis
for any praise or blame, and no-one has ever said that
they could. The (2) external action or movement of the
body is often the same in the most innocent and in the
most blameworthy actions. •Shooting a bird, •shooting a
man—these are the same external movement, pulling the
trigger of a gun. And (3) the consequences that actually
happen to come from an action are as irrelevant to praise
and blame as is the external movement of the body—even
more irrelevant if that is possible! The consequences of the
action depend not on the agent but on luck [Smith’s word, here
and throughout, is ‘fortune’], so they can’t be the proper basis for
any sentiment of which the agent’s character and conduct
are the objects.
The only consequences for which he is accountable, or
by which he can deserve either approval or disapproval of
any kind, are ones that were in some way intended, or ·if not
outright intended, then· at least show some agreeable or disagreeable quality in the intention from which the agent acted.
So there we have it: any judgment of the action’s rightness
or wrongness, its beneficence or harmfulness of design, any
praise or blame for it, any approval or disapproval, is just
only if it is based on the intention or affection of the heart
from which the action arose.
Everyone agrees with this thesis when it is stated, as
here, in abstract and general terms; its obvious rightness
is acknowledged by all the world, with no dissenting voice
among all mankind. Everyone accepts that the accidental,
unintended and unforeseen consequences of an action, however good they are, don’t make the action a suitable object
of gratitude if the intention or affection was malevolent; and
however bad they are, they don’t make the action a suitable
object of resentment if the intention or affection was good.
But however sure we are about this, stated in the abstract, when we get down to particular cases our sentiments
concerning the merit or demerit of an action are in fact
greatly affected—in one direction or the other—by what
actual consequences happened to come from it. We all
accept the rule that actual consequences are irrelevant to
an action’s moral status, and yet it hardly ever happens that
our ·moral· sentiments are entirely regulated by it. This is
an irregularity of sentiment that
everyone feels,
hardly anyone is sufficiently aware of, and
nobody is willing to acknowledge.
I now proceed to explain it, ·in three chapters, in which· I
shall discuss (1) the cause of this irregularity, (2) the extent
of its influence, and (3) the end purpose that ·God·, the
Author of nature, seems to have intended by it.
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Chapter 1: The causes of this influence of luck
II: Merit and demerit
But for something to be a proper object of gratitude or
resentment it must not only •cause pleasure or pain but
must also •be capable of feeling them. If it doesn’t have this
capacity, there’s no way for gratitude or resentment to be
satisfied in relation to it. Having been aroused by the causes
of pleasure and pain, those passions can be satisfied only
by retaliating those sensations on what caused them; and
there’s no point in trying to do that with an object that isn’t
sentient. So animals are less improper objects of gratitude
and resentment than inanimate objects. The dog that bites,
the ox that gores, are both of them punished. If an animal
causes someone’s death, neither that person’s relatives or
the public in general will be satisfied unless the animal
is put to death in its turn; not merely for •the security of
the living, but also to some extent to •revenge the injury
of the dead. On the other hand, animals that have been
remarkably serviceable to their masters become objects of a
lively gratitude. . . .
All causes of pain and pleasure—all of them—seem to immediately arouse gratitude and resentment in all animals.
Those passions are aroused by inanimate as well as by
animate objects. We are briefly angry even with the stone that
hurts us; a child beats it, a dog barks at it, a bad-tempered
man is apt to curse it. A moment’s thought corrects this
sentiment, making us realize that something that has no
feeling is a very improper object of revenge! But when great
harm has been done by an inanimate object, that object
becomes disagreeable to us ever after, and we take pleasure
in burning or destroying it. That is how we would treat
something that had accidentally been the cause of the death
of a friend, and we would often think ourselves guilty of
a sort of inhumanity if we didn’t vent this absurd sort of
vengeance on it.
In the same way we have a sort of gratitude for inanimate
objects that have caused great pleasure or frequent pleasure.
The sailor escapes from a shipwreck with the help of a plank;
if as soon as he gets back to land he uses the plank as
firewood, he will strike us as being guilty of an unnatural
action. We would have expected him to preserve the plank
with care and affection, as a monument that was dear to
him. After years of using a snuff-box, a pen-knife, and a
walking-stick, a man grows fond of them and feels something
like a real love and affection for them. If he breaks or loses
them, he is upset out of all proportion to the value of the
damage. The house that we have long lived in, and the tree
whose green shade we have long enjoyed, are both looked
on with a sort of respect that such benefactors seem to be
owed. The decay of the house or the death of the tree affects
us with a kind of melancholy, even though it doesn’t bring
any loss to us. . . .
But. . . .animals are still far from being complete and
perfect objects of gratitude or resentment. What gratitude
wants most is not only •to make the benefactor feel pleasure
in his turn, but •to make him aware that he is being rewarded
for his past conduct, to make him pleased with that conduct,
and to convince him that the person he helped was worth
helping. What charms us most about our benefactor is
the match between his sentiments and ours concerning the
worth of our own character and the respect that is due to
us. We are delighted to find someone who values us as we
value ourselves, and picks us out from the rest of mankind
in somewhat the way in which we pick out ourselves! One of
our main purposes in rewarding him is to maintain in him
these agreeable and flattering sentiments (though the best
of us won’t pursue this with the further purpose of getting
new favours from the benefactor). And this is the reason
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for something that I pointed out earlier, namely that when
we can’t enter into the motives of our benefactor, when his
conduct and character appear unworthy of our approval, our
gratitude for his services to us—however great they have
been—is significantly lessened. We are less flattered by his
picking us out for special favour; and keeping the respect of
such a weak or worthless patron seems not to be something
worth pursuing for its own sake.
On the other hand, the chief purpose of resentment is
not merely to make our enemy feel pain in his turn, but
to make him aware that he is feeling pain because of his
past conduct, to make him repent of that conduct, and to
make him feel that the person he injured didn’t deserve to
be treated in that manner. What chiefly enrages us against
the man who injures or insults us is his writing us off as
insignificant, his unreasonable preference for himself over
us, and the absurd self-love that apparently leads him to
imagine that other people may be sacrificed at any time for
his convenience or at his whim. The glaring impropriety of
this conduct, the gross insolence and injustice that it seems
to involve, often shock and exasperate us more than all the
harm that we have suffered. To bring him back to a better
sense of what is due to other people, to make him aware of
what he owes us and of the wrong that he has done to us,
is often the main purpose of our revenge, which is always
incomplete when it can’t accomplish this. . . .
Thus, before anything can be a complete and proper
object of either gratitude or resentment it must possess
three different qualifications. (1) It must be the cause of
pleasure in one case, of pain in the other. (2) It must be
capable of feeling those sensations. (3) It must not merely
have produced those sensations but must have done so
from design—a design that is approved of in one case and
disapproved of in the other. It’s (1) that makes an object
II: Merit and demerit
capable of arousing gratitude and resentment; it’s because
of (2) that these passions can in some way be satisfied; and
(3) is not only needed for the gratitude or resentment to be
complete, but also provides an extra cause of those passions
because of the special and intense pleasure or pain that it
involves.
The sole arousing cause of gratitude is something that
gives pleasure; so that even when a person’s intentions are
utterly proper and beneficent, if he has failed actually to
produce the good that he intended, less gratitude seems to
be due to him because one of the arousing causes is lacking.
And the sole arousing cause of resentment is something
that gives pain; so that even when a person’s intentions are
utterly improper and malevolent, if he has failed actually to
produce the evil that he intended, less resentment seems
to be due to him because one of the arousing causes is
lacking. [Smith really does move from ‘the sole cause’ to ‘one of the
causes’, a move that he needs for his conclusion about ‘less’ gratitude or
On the other hand, even when
a person’s intentions don’t have any laudable degree of
benevolence, if his actions happen to produce great good,
because one of the arousing causes has occurred some
gratitude is apt to arise towards him—a shadow of merit
seems to fall on him. And when a person’s intentions don’t
have any blameworthy degree of malice, if his actions should
happen to produce great evil, because one of the arousing
causes has occurred some resentment is apt to arise towards
him—a shadow of demerit seems to fall on him. And, as the
consequences of actions are entirely under the dominance
of luck [remember that Smith’s word throughout is ‘fortune’], what I
have been describing is the source of luck’s influence on the
sentiments of mankind regarding merit and demerit.
resentment rather than none.]
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Chapter 2: The extent of this influence of luck
II: Merit and demerit
advantages he seems to be losing only a trifle that is hardly
worth thinking about. But still he does lose something, so
that his pleasure and gratitude are not perfectly complete.
Therefore, as between the friend who fails and the friend
who succeeds, other things being equal, the noblest and best
mind will have some little difference of affection in favour of
the one who succeeds. Indeed, people are so unjust about
this that even when the intended benefit is procured, they
are apt to think that less gratitude is due to the benefactor if
he wasn’t the sole producer of the benefit. . . .
The effect of this influence of luck is (1) to lessen our sense
of the merit or demerit of actions that arose from praiseworthy or blameworthy intentions but failed to produce their
intended effects; and (2) to increase our sense of the merit
or demerit of actions, beyond what is due to the motives
or affections that they come from, when they accidentally
give rise to either extraordinary pleasure or extraordinary
pain. ·This chapter will be devoted to discussions of these
two effects·.
(1) To repeat the point: however proper and beneficent
(or improper and malevolent) a person’s intentions in acting
are, if the intended effect doesn’t happen his merit seems
imperfect (or his demerit seems incomplete). This irregularity
of sentiment is felt not only •by those who are immediately
affected by the consequences of the action in question
but also to some extent even •by the impartial spectator.
·In discussing this matter, I shall start with failed •good
intentions and then turn to failed •bad ones·.
(1a). . . .It is often said that we are equally obliged to •a
man who has tried to help us and to •one who actually did
so. That’s the speech that we regularly make after every
unsuccessful attempt of this kind; but like all other fine
speeches it mustn’t be taken too strictly. The sentiments
that a generous-minded man has for the friend who fails ·to
help him· may often be nearly the same as what he feels
for the one who succeeds; and the more generous he is the
nearer his sentiments will come to that level. [For ‘generous’
see note on page 11.] A truly generous-minded man will get
more pleasure from—and be more grateful for—•the love
and respect he gets from people he thinks to be worthy of
respect than for all the •advantages he can ever expect to
flow from that love and respect. So when he loses those
Even the merit of talents and abilities that some accident
has prevented from producing their effects seems somewhat
imperfect, even to people who are fully convinced that the
person does have the capacity to produce those effects.
[Smith gives the example of a general whose battle plans
were excellent but who is robbed of victory by political
interference from his own side:] Although he might deserve
all the approval that is due to a great military plan, he still
lacks the actual merit of having performed a great action. . . .
It angers an architect when his plans are either not carried
out at all, or carried out with so many alterations that the
effect of the building is spoiled. The only thing that depends
on the architect is the plan; and good judges can see his
genius being revealed in that as completely as in the actual
building. But even to those who know most about such
things a •plan doesn’t give the same pleasure as does a
•noble and magnificent building. . . . There may be many
men of whom we believe ‘He is more talented than Caesar
and Alexander; placed in the situations they were in, he
would perform still greater feats’. But in the mean time,
however, we don’t view such a man with the wonder and
admiration with which those two heroes have been regarded
in all ages and nations. The calm judgments of the mind
may approve of him more, but the mind isn’t dazzled and
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carried away by the splendour of great actions. . . .
(1b) Just as the merit of an unsuccessful attempt to do
good seems to ungrateful mankind to be lessened if the
attempt fails, so also does the demerit of an unsuccessful
attempt to do evil. The plan to commit a crime, however
clearly it is proved to exist, is hardly ever punished with
the same severity as the actual commission of the crime.
The only exception to this may be the crime of treason.
Because that crime immediately affects the existence of the
government itself, the government is naturally more touchy
about it than about any other. When the sovereign punishes
•other crimes, he is acting on the resentment that he feels
through sympathy with the victims of the crimes. But when
he punishes •treason, he is acting on his own resentment
of harm done to himself. So that here he is judging in his
own cause, which makes him apt to be more violent and
bloody in his punishments than the impartial spectator can
approve of. Also, when treason is involved, it takes less to
trigger the sovereign’s resentment, which doesn’t always wait
for the committing of the crime or even for the attempt to
commit it. A treasonable conspiracy, though nothing has
been done or even attempted as a result of it—indeed a mere
treasonable conversation—is in many countries punished in
the same way as the actual commission of treason. With any
other crime, the mere design—with no attempt to carry it
through—is seldom punished at all, and is never punished
severely. This may be said:
‘A criminal •design doesn’t necessarily involve the
same degree of depravity as a criminal •action, and
therefore shouldn’t be subjected to the same punishment. We are capable of •deciding, and even of taking
steps towards performing, many things that—when
it comes to the point—we feel ourselves entirely incapable of •doing.’
II: Merit and demerit
But this line of thought doesn’t apply when the design
has been carried through to the last attempt. Yet there
is hardly any country where the man who fires a pistol
at his enemy but misses him is punished with death. . . .
But mankind’s resentment against the crime of murder is
so intense, and their fear of the man who shows himself
capable of committing it is so great, that the mere attempt to
commit it ought in all countries to be a capital offence. The
attempt to commit smaller crimes is almost always punished
lightly, and sometimes is not punished at all. The thief
whose hand has been caught in his neighbour’s pocket
before he had taken anything out of it is punished only
with the disgrace of being exposed as a thief; if he’d had
time to steal a handkerchief, he would have been put to
death. The burglar who has been found setting a ladder to
his neighbour’s window but hasn’t gone through the window
is not exposed to capital punishment. The attempt to ravish
a woman is not punished as a rape. The attempt to seduce a
married woman is not punished at all, though ·successful·
seduction is punished severely. Our resentment against
someone who tried and failed to commit a crime is seldom
strong enough to lead us to punishment in the way we would
have thought proper if he had succeeded. In the failure
case, our joy at being spared the actual crime alleviates
•our sense of the atrocity of his conduct; in the success
case, the grief of our misfortune increases •it. Yet his real
demerit is undoubtedly the same in both cases, since his
intentions were equally criminal; and there is in this respect,
therefore, an irregularity in the sentiments of all men, and a
consequent relaxation of discipline in the laws of, I believe, all
nations the most civilized as well as the most barbarous. [The
‘irregularity’ Smith speaks of is just the phenomenon of our accepting
a general rule—Latin regula—and then having sentiments that don’t
conform to it. We’ll meet the term again.]. . . .
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[Smith next writes about the fundamentally decent person
who somehow gets involved in planning a crime, and is
prevented from succeeding by some accident. He must think
that this was a lucky rescue, saving him from spending ‘the
rest of his life in horror, remorse, and repentance’. He knows
that his heart is as guilty as it would have been if he had
succeeded, but his failure to commit the crime eases his
conscience so that he ‘considers himself as less deserving of
punishment and resentment’ than he would have been if he
has succeeded.]
(2) The second effect of this influence of luck is to increase
our sense of the merit (or demerit) of actions beyond what is
due to the motives or feelings that produce them, when they
happen to cause extraordinary pleasure (or pain). . . . For
example, a messenger who brings bad news is disagreeable
to us, whereas we feel a sort of gratitude to the man who
brings us good news. For a moment we regard them as the
authors of our good fortune (in one case) and of our bad
fortune (in the other), looking at them rather as though they
had really brought about the events that they only report to
us. [Smith goes into some details about this, concluding
thus:] King Tigranes of Armenia struck off the head of the
man who brought him the first account of the approach of
a formidable enemy. To punish the bringer of bad news
in this way seems barbarous and inhuman; but rewarding
the messenger bringing good news is not disagreeable to
us—we think it suitable to the generosity of kings. Why
do we make this distinction when if there’s no fault in the
one there’s no merit in the other? It is because any sort
of reason seems sufficient to authorize the expressing of
the social and benevolent affections, whereas it requires the
most solid and substantial reasons to make us sympathetic
to the expression of unsocial and malevolent ones.
II: Merit and demerit
. . . .There is a class of exceptions to this general rule that
no-one should be punished for conduct that wasn’t based on
malicious and unjust intentions. When someone’s negligence
has caused unintended harm to someone else, we generally
enter into the sufferer’s resentment far enough to approve of
his punishing the offender far more than his offence would
have appeared to deserve if no such unlucky consequence
had followed from it.
There is a level of negligence that would appear to deserve
some punishment even if it didn’t harm anyone, Suppose
someone threw a large stone over a wall into a public street,
without warning anyone and without considering where it
was likely to fall. He would undoubtedly deserve some
punishment. A really precise penal law would punish this
absurd action even if it did no harm. The person who is
guilty of it shows that he insolently regards the happiness
and safety of others as negligible. There is real injustice
in his conduct. He recklessly exposes his neighbour to a
risk that no man in his senses would choose to expose
himself to, and evidently lacks the sense of what is due
to his fellow-creatures that is the basis of justice and of
society. Gross negligence therefore is said in the law to be
almost equal to malicious design. When such carelessness
happens to have bad consequences, the guilty person is often
punished as if he had really intended those consequences;
and his conduct, which was really only •thoughtless and
insolent and deserving of some punishment, is considered
as •atrocious and as liable to the severest punishment. If
the stone-throwing action that I have mentioned should accidentally kill a man, the laws of many countries—particularly
by the old law of Scotland—will condemn the stone-thrower
to death. This is no doubt too severe, but it’s not altogether
inconsistent with our natural sentiments. Our just indignation against the folly and inhumanity of the man’s conduct
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is intensified by our sympathy with the unfortunate sufferer.
But nothing would appear more shocking to our natural
sense of fairness than to bring a man to the scaffold merely
for having thrown a stone carelessly into the street without
harming any body. The folly and inhumanity of his conduct
would be the same in this case ·as in the case where a
passer-by is killed by the stone·, but our sentiments would
be different. Thinking about this difference can show us how
much the indignation of the spectator is apt to be worked
up by the actual consequences of the action. In cases of this
kind. I think, there is a great degree of severity in the laws
of almost all nations. . . .
There’s another degree of negligence that doesn’t involve
in it any sort of injustice. The person who is guilty of it
treats his neighbours as he treats himself, means no harm
to anyone, and is far from having an insolent disregard for
the safety and happiness of others. But he isn’t as careful
and circumspect in his conduct as he ought to be, and for
that reason he deserves some kind of blame and censure,
but no sort of punishment. However, if by a negligence of this
kind he causes harm to another person, the laws of every
country (I believe) will require him to pay compensation.
No doubt this is a real punishment, and no-one would have
thought of inflicting it on him if it hadn’t been for the unlucky
accident that his conduct caused; yet this decision of the
law is approved of by the natural sentiments of all mankind.
Nothing, we think, can be more just than that one man
should not suffer through someone else’s carelessness, and
that the damage caused by culpable negligence should be
paid for by the person who was guilty of it.
[Smith now gives us a whole page about a still lower level
of negligence, which consists in not acting with ‘the most
anxious timidity and circumspection’, i.e. with a kind of
caution that would be a fault, not a virtue—a fault because
II: Merit and demerit
life can’t satisfactorily be lived with that much concern for
possible bad consequences. If one person hurts another
through this kind of ‘negligence’, it is usual and natural
for him to apologize and express his concern for the sufferer’s welfare, and (if he is a decent person) he will offer
compensation for the damage he has done and do what he
can to soothe the resentment that the sufferer is likely to
feel. Smith continues:] To make no apology, to offer no
atonement, is regarded ·by us all· as the highest brutality.
Yet why should he apologize more than anyone else? Why
should he, since he was as innocent as any other bystander,
be thus singled out from among all mankind to make up
for someone else’s bad luck? This task wouldn’t have been
imposed on him if it weren’t for the fact that the impartial
spectator feels some indulgence for what may be regarded
as the unjust resentment of the sufferer. [Here and in one
other place, Smith speaks of ‘animal resentment’, evidently meaning
‘resentment that is natural but not defensible through any acceptable
general moral principles’.]
Chapter 3:
sentiments
The purpose of this irregularity of
That is how the good or bad consequences of an action
affect the sentiments both of the agent and of others; so
that is how luck [‘fortune’], which governs the world, has
influence in the area where we should be least willing to
allow it any, and partly directs the sentiments of mankind
regarding the character and conduct both of themselves and
of others. Everyone judges by the outcome, and not by the
design—that has been the complaint down through the ages,
and is the great discouragement of virtue. Everyone agrees
to the •general maxim that because the outcome doesn’t
depend on the agent it oughtn’t to influence our sentiments
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regarding the merit or propriety of his conduct. But our
sentiments in •particular cases almost never exactly conform
to what this reasonable maxim would require. The happy or
unprosperous outcome of any action not only •is apt to give
us a good or bad opinion of the prudence with which it was
conducted, but nearly always also •sparks our gratitude or
resentment, our sense of the merit or demerit of the design.
II: Merit and demerit
regarding merit or demerit, which at first sight appears so
absurd and indefensible, is the basis for the necessary rule of
justice that men in this life are liable to punishment only for
their actions and not for their designs and intentions. In fact,
when we look carefully into any part of nature we find this
sort of evidence of the providential care of its Author—we
can admire the wisdom and goodness of God even in the
weakness and folly of man.
But when Nature planted the seeds of this irregularity
in the human breast, she seems to have intended—as she
always does—the happiness and perfection of our species. If
the only causes of our •resentment were the harmfulness of
the design and the malevolence of the affection, we would
feel all the furies of •that passion against anyone whom
we suspected of having such designs or affections, even if
they had never broken out into any action. Sentiments,
thoughts, intentions, would become objects of punishment;
and if the indignation of mankind ran as high against them
as against actions—if the baseness of a •thought that didn’t
lead to any action seemed to us all to call as loudly for
vengeance as the baseness of the •action—every court of law
would become a real inquisition. There would be no safety
for the most innocent and cautious conduct. Bad wishes,
bad views, bad designs, might still be suspected. . . .and
would expose the person to punishment and resentment
just as bad actions do. So the Author of nature has seen
to it that the only proper and approved objects of human
punishment and resentment are actions—actions that either
•produce actual evil or •try to produce it and thereby put us
in the immediate fear of it. According to cool reason, human
actions derive their whole merit or demerit from •sentiments,
designs, affections; but ·God·, the great Judge of hearts has
placed •these outside the scope of every human jurisdiction,
reserving them to be considered in his own unerring tribunal.
This salutary and useful irregularity in human sentiments
Here’s another irregularity of sentiments that has some
utility: the merit of an unsuccessful attempt to do something
good appears to be imperfect; and the merit of mere good
inclinations and kind wishes is even more so. Man was made
for action—to exercise his faculties to promote changes in
the external circumstances both of himself and others in
ways that seem most favourable to the happiness of all. He
mustn’t be satisfied with slack benevolence, or see himself
as the friend of mankind because in his heart he wishes well
to the prosperity of the world! The purpose of his existence is
to produce certain states of affairs; Nature wants him to call
forth the whole vigour of his soul and to strain every nerve
to produce them; so she has taught him that neither he nor
anyone else can whole-heartedly applaud or be fully satisfied
with his conduct unless he actually produces them. . . . The
man who hasn’t performed a single action of importance, but
whose whole conversation and manner express the justest,
the noblest, and most generous sentiments, isn’t entitled to
demand any high reward even if his inutility is purely due
to his having had no opportunity to serve. . . . We can still
ask him: ‘What have you done? What actual service can you
point to that entitles you to such a large reward? We respect
you and love you, but we don’t owe you anything.’ It would
take •the most divine benevolence to reward the virtue that
has been useless only because there has been no opportunity
to serve, giving it the honours and preferments that it may
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be said to deserve but wasn’t entitled to insist on. On the
other hand, to punish mere affections of the heart where
no crime has been committed is •insolent and barbarous
tyranny. The benevolent affections seem to deserve most
praise when they are acted on quickly (rather than being
delayed until it becomes almost a crime not to act on them!);
whereas it’s almost impossible for a malevolent affection to
be too tardy, too slow, or deliberate in being acted on.
It is important that the evil that is done without design
should be regarded as a misfortune to the doer as well as
to the sufferer. By having that attitude, man is taught to
reverence the happiness of his brethren, to tremble lest he
should unknowingly do anything that can harm them, and
to fear the animal resentment that he feels is ready to burst
out against him if he should unintentionally be the unhappy
instrument of their calamity. ·Here is a kind of model or
metaphor for the point I want to make·:
In the ancient heathen religion, holy ground that
had been consecrated to some god was not to be
walked on except on solemn and necessary occasions.
Someone who violated this, even if he did it in ignorance, became piacular from that moment, and until
proper atonement was made he was vulnerable to
the vengeance of the powerful and invisible being for
whom that ground had been set apart.
II: Merit and demerit
in proportion to the magnitude of the unintended
violation.
A humane man who accidentally and with absolutely no
blameworthy negligence has been the cause of the death of
another man feels that he is •piacular, though not •guilty.
During his whole life he regards this accident as one of the
greatest misfortunes that could have befallen him. If the
family of the slain man is poor and he himself is fairly well
off, he immediately takes them under his protection. . . .and
thinks them entitled to every degree of favour and kindness.
If they are wealthier than he is, he tries by every submission,
by every expression of sorrow, by giving them any service
that he can devise and they will accept, to atone for what
has happened and to placate as much as possible their
resentment for the great though unintended offence that he
has given them. (Their resentment is certainly most unjust,
but it is also natural.)
[Smith adds a paragraph about the role of this aspect
of the human condition—‘this fallacious sense of guilt’—in
theatrical drama. Of Oedipus and Jocasta he says that they
are both ‘in the highest degree piacular’ though neither is ‘in
the smallest degree guilty’.]
Despite all these seeming irregularities of sentiment, if a
man has the bad luck to cause evils that he didn’t intend, or
to fail in producing good that he did intend, Nature hasn’t
left his innocence with no consolation or his virtue with no
reward. What the man does is to get help from that just
and equitable maxim: Outcomes that didn’t depend on our
conduct ought not to lessen the respect that is due to us. He
summons up his whole magnanimity and firmness of soul,
and works to regard himself not in the light in which he does
at present appear, but in the light
[To be ‘piacular’ is to be in a state in which one needs to make atonement,
to expiate, for something one has done.] Now compare that with
this:
By the wisdom of Nature the happiness of every
innocent man is made holy, consecrated, hedged
round against the approach of every other man; not to
be wantonly walked on, and not even to be in any
way violated, even ignorantly and unintentionally,
without requiring some expiation, some atonement
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II: Merit and demerit
The more just and humane part of mankind entirely go along
with this effort he is making to support himself in his own
opinion. They exert their whole generosity of mind to correct
in themselves this irregularity of human nature, and try
to regard his unlucky good intention in the light in which,
if it had been successful, they would have been naturally
disposed to consider it, without any such moral effort.
•in which he ought to appear,
•in which he would have appeared if his generous plans
had met with success, and
•in which he would be appearing now, despite the
plans’ failure, if mankind’s sentiments were entirely
just and fair, or even entirely consistent with themselves.
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